Tag Archives: MAGA

Ignorance And Stupidity

On this 4th of July, America is reeling under the combined threats of official ignorance and pervasive stupidity.

To be human, of course, is to be ignorant. There are all sorts of things that virtually all of us fail to understand. In my house, it tends to be most aspects of the emerging digital universe (I know AI is coming but have absolutely no idea how it works or what it portends, and my ability to understand the various devices my grandchildren grew up with is similarly limited). A depressingly significant portion of the population is ignorant of America’s legal framework and the most basic premises undergirding the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For millions of Americans, it’s ignorance of science and the significant difference between a scientific theory and the common use of the term “theory” as an unsupported guess.

Rather obviously, these knowledge gaps are not mutually exclusive….

Ignorance can be remedied. With proper motivation, most of us can fill in those empty spaces in our understanding. We can learn. Stupidity, however, isn’t amenable to similar correction. It’s defined as a lack of intelligence or understanding–an inability to reason or learn.

We are currently governed by people who exhibit both, elected by voters who–at the very least–were ignorant of both the nature of public service and the damage that predictably ensues when incompetent ideologues are placed in positions of authority.

America has a secretary of health and human services whose conspiratorial approach to reality and inability to understand science has led (among other appalling things) to a major outbreak of measles–a disease once virtually eradicated–and who has suggested that those afflicted take cod liver oil. We have an agriculture secretary whose “solution” to high egg prices is advice that we raise our own chickens. We have a secretary of defense–a dipsomaniac– who accidently included a journalist on an unsecured call in which national security matters were discussed. The list goes on…

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that contains MAGA’s policy priorities won’t just deprive millions of health care in order to line the pockets of our plutocrats– it will destroy this country’s storied educational institutions, and derail America’s scientific and technological progress.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ridding the country of immigrants–not simply those who’ve committed crimes, as candidate Trump promised, but any immigrant who lacks lily-white skin– is perhaps the best example of the profound stupidity that always accompanies racism.

Immigrants have been essential elements of American innovation and economic growth. Research conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy in 2010 documented their importance. More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, the companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

As we are discovering, America’s agriculture and construction industries overwhelmingly rely on immigrants, the majority of whom are undocumented.

MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its equally ignorant White Christian Nationalism. There has always been a nativist streak in America– Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The animus isn’t new, but it rests on widespread ignorance. As David Brooks (no bleeding heart liberal) has observed, when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. “The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

Trump’s fixation on immigration has consistently been both stupid and ignorant, as well as inhumane. Remember his first term promise to build a “beautiful wall” on our southern border? The vast majority of people who are in the country illegally flew in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent. (It would, however, focus on those Brown people…)

MAGA’s slogan ought to be: “Owning the libs by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” Unfortunately, we “libs” live here too…

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And The Hits Keep Coming..

If there is any consistent theme that runs through the Trump administration’s “governance,” it is antipathy to science and education. RFK, Jr. presides over a truly horrifying assault on medical science;  Trump’s torrent of Executive Orders has hobbled government’s ability to deal with climate change (which MAGA denies)…the list goes on.

And then there’s the Right’s persistent, vicious war on education. Theirs is a movement that is trying–with some terrifying successes–to take America back to the Dark Ages. That effort isn’t new–the now decades-old effort to privatize education, to evade the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State and destroy public education by sending students and tax dollars to religious schools– has recently been joined by an all-out assault on the nation’s universities.

It isn’t just Trump’s assault on elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard. As a recent report from The New Republic documents, among the other obscenities in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” are measures that amount to “an extinction-level event” for the nation’s universities. As the article warns, “If you think the last few months have been bad for Harvard, brace yourself—the “big, beautiful bill” is coming, and with it, a new dimension of destruction.”

While it’s mostly gone unremarked upon in the mainstream media, institutions of higher learning across the country are about to be pummeled by the looming reconciliation bill, which may portend an extinction event for higher education as we know it. The bill weaponizes working-class families’ reliance on debt to finance their college dreams with such intensity that not only will it push millions to the financial brink, it will push them out of higher education altogether.

As the report makes clear, the fallout from these provisions will be monumental. The effect will be to deprive the schools that manage to survive of working- and middle-class families. A college education will once again be within reach of  only the wealthy.

As the article notes, millions of people already consider a university education “to be a costly endeavor that is irrelevant to their everyday life.” That reality would suggest that we should remake higher education into a much more accessible endeavor– that legislators should recognize that improving the educational level of a population translates directly into social and fiscal health. But–consistent with the rest of a bill that honest labelling would title “Protecting Plutocracy”–the legislation would do the opposite. “It will cement the stereotype of higher education as an elite institution into an ironclad reality.”

This existential assault on higher education is not inadvertent–not an unanticipated consequence of fiscal legislation. It is entirely consistent with the goals of Project 2025 and the far-Right anti-intellectual MAGA figures who have already decimated much of Florida’s higher education landscape. The article includes a quotation from influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo, confirming the desired results. “Reforming the student loan programs could put the whole university sector into a significant recession” and state of “existential terror.”

And just in case American voters return a sane occupant to the Oval Office, the bill removes the power of a future President to cancel federal student loans.

While details are still being negotiated between the obtuse and vicious GOP members of the House and Senate, if the measure passes in anything like its current form,  eight million student debtors will see their monthly payments spike from $0 to over $400.

Dentists and doctors who choose to work in low-paying community health care centers will no longer be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs, dramatically reducing the number of health care providers in communities that are already underserved. The bill even comes after the long-standing, Republican-approved federal student loan repayment plans, which allow borrowers to discharge their debts after a certain number of years of regular payments.

The House version cuts Pell Grants and increases the course load required for part-time students to access aid. People with  jobs or family responsibilities will find it nearly impossible to comply. And House Republicans want colleges and universities to pay back unpaid federal loans extended to “high risk” students–a move designed to penalize institutions that serve low-income students who are more likely to default, turning “the working-class kid studying to become a social worker, artist, or a physician into a liability to her university.”

None of this is accidental.

A recent Heritage Foundation report recommends terminating higher education “subsidies” in order to “increase the married birthrate.” In plain English, it’s an effort to reduce women’s access to higher education–an access that has facilitated women’s growing civic and economic equality. MAGA wants more babies and fewer women in the workforce.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” is a MAGA wet dream.

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The South Did Rise Again

Let’s “get real,” as the kids might say. MAGA is the embodiment and resurgence of the Confederacy–a less geographically-bound version of the South that is determined to rise again. And this time, the war isn’t limited to Black folks–it includes all “others”–gays, women, Muslims, Jews…

The evidence is overwhelming.

The New York Times noted that Trump had made no statement about Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, despite the fact that lesser occasions routinely garner official proclamations.

On the day the Supreme Court ruled against gender-affirming care for transgender youth, the Trump administration ended specialized support for LGBTQ callers to the national suicide prevention hotline.

The Atlantic recently opined that

Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the “whirlwinds of revolt,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this “racial reckoning,” as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into “Juneteenth National Independence Day,” a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades.

The administration’s frantic effort to defeat “woke-ism” and DEI–which it characterizes as bias against White Christian men–gives the game away. They aren’t trying to level the playing field–they are trying to return White men to social dominance. Consider just some of what this administration has done.

Trump’s Executive Order 14151 (“Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs”) terminated DEI units, removed references to minority achievements, and purged employees involved in diversity efforts. Another Executive Order
Issued on the same day revoked LBJ’s historic affirmative action order, and stripped federal agencies of the authority to enforce non-discrimination in federal contracting.

Agencies like NASA, DOE, HHS, NIH, DOD, CIA, FBI, NSF, and DOE have all removed so-called “DEI content” from webpages and other materials. We’ve seen ships carrying the names of LGBTQ figures and women renamed. (That renaming is in line with Trump’s announced intention to restore the names of Confederate traitors to the army bases that shed them.)

The current EEOC Chair has followed Trump’s directives and “deprioritized” discrimination cases related to gender identity and pushed agencies to investigate and pressure law firms and corporations with DEI programs. The Department of Justice has been directed to probe corporate DEI policies criminally and has withdrawn previous civil rights settlements tied to equity.

The Pentagon has removed content honoring Blacks, Indigenous individuals, women, and LGBTQ+ service members. Examples include the Navajo Code Talkers, Jackie Robinson, and Harvey Milk. And it isn’t only Juneteenth; agencies have also canceled or muted celebrations of other identity-based holidays like Pride Month and Black History Month.

Trump canceled more than 2,100 NIH grants totaling an estimated ten billion dollars that the administration deemed tied to diversity and inclusion. (A judge has ruled those cuts illegal and discriminatory.) 

There’s more, but the pattern is unmistakable. Scholars attest that the removal of content celebrating minority achievements and history mimics the classic white supremacist tactic of erasing the narratives of marginalized groups. The historical parallels are striking: analysts and historians have drawn comparisons between Trump’s policies and Reconstruction-era actions by white supremacists, not to mention 1930s-era, fascist efforts to control historical narratives and redefine “meritocracy.” 

We are once again in a contest between tribalism and universalism, between racism and humanism. Tribalism, however, is the essence of anti-Americanism. Ours is not a “blood and soil” country, like Nazi Germany, with its ideal of a racially defined national body. 

MAGA, with its version of White Christian male supremacy, is today’s Confederacy. It wants to restrict who can be considered authentically American, and applauds Trump’s efforts to reclassify those despised “others” as–at best–guests of those entitled to the title. It is an effort that demeans what is truly “exceptional” about the United States–the philosophical base on which the country rests.

The nation established by the Founders–admittedly all White guys (albeit not all traditional Christians)–was something new to our quarrelsome globe: it was an IDEA. And over time, most of us who occupy this land have come to realize that the proper definition of an American is anyone–of any gender, color or belief– who accepts and endorses that Idea. 

The New Confederacy will go the way of the old one. We the People–all people– just need to step up the Resistance…

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Law Versus Power

There’s a tendency to confuse the rule of law with obedience to the rules of a regime.

Within that confusion lies one of the multiple, dangerous threats posed by our current administration–a threat that became manifestly clear when Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists. Autocrats can devise rules; the rule of law, however, is defined as a durable system characterized by four universal principles: accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and impartial justice.

Those elements are entirely foreign to MAGA and Trump. (Let’s face it–Trump wouldn’t even be able to define those terms…)

The chaos of the Trump administration, and the breadth of its attacks on democratic governance, have operated to distract public attention from its ongoing assault on the rule of law, and its persistent substitution of rules benefitting plutocrats and autocrats for laws benefiting society.

A recent issue of the American Prospect addressed that under-appreciated assault.

A functioning economy depends on a basic principle: cheaters shouldn’t win. But Donald Trump has tossed aside that principle, and that has real consequences. When the rules disappear, the worst actors thrive and everyone else pays the price.

In our new print issue, we examine how the collapse of financial enforcement and consumer protection is opening the floodgates to a golden age of scams. Under Trump, the referees have left the field. Civil penalties go unenforced. White-collar fraudsters are rewarded with pardons. Entire arms of the government designed to prevent theft, abuse, and discrimination are being dismantled.

It’s an intentional choice to let exploitation run wild. If there’s a way to game the system, someone’s doing it—and now they’re doing it with the government’s blessing.

The issue documented a variety of scams that have gained new security against government enforcement. One article reported on the multiple ways in which the gutting of the CFPB–the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–has facilitated a wide variety of rackets and frauds. Another article delved into the failures of the Department of Education under Trump to protect student loan recipients from predatory lenders.

An article titled “Three Coin Monte” described what the magazine calls “the greatest and most brazen tale of corruption in history”– Trump’s crypto project. That article outlined “how Trump is using his ‘shitcoin’ to monetize the presidency and create new avenues for influence peddling.”

There’s also an explanation of a scam involving merchant cash advances. These are transactions in which tycoons sell what are effectively payday loans to small businesses and ruin their livelihoods. (We are told that one of those “tycoons” was on Trump’s pardon list in 2020; he’s back in jail, for now.)

These investigative articles are just a few examples of what happens when government fails in what has always been considered a foundational task: to prevent some citizens from taking advantage of others, to prevent the strong (or unscrupulous) from harming the weak and/or naive.

Donald Trump’s government has corrupted the very concept of law. The evidence is overwhelming: the gutting of the Department of Justice, the indiscriminate labeling of immigrants as “criminals” as justification for masked ICE agents’ thuggish behaviors, the appalling arrests of elected lawmakers on transparently false premises, orders from the administration to the EPA directing the agency not to enforce environmental rules against fossil fuel companies, the Trump family’s failure to even try to mask its monetization of the Presidency…the list goes on.

When the rule of law is replaced with rules favoring the predatory, when people in positions of authority sneer at the very notion of ethics and ethical behavior, when elected members of Congress fail to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities, ordinary citizens lose respect for the very concept of law. Corrupt regimes encourage lawbreaking by people who wouldn’t otherwise be scofflaws. Cynicism explodes. The trust on which societies rely evaporates.

The central goal of Project 2025 was to replace the rule of law with rules allowing selected people to exercise unrestrained and arbitrary power–power to give their sycophants and fellow-travelers free reign to plunder, but–more fundamentally– to facilitate the remaking of America into the Lily-White “Christian” nation of Project 2025’s fantasies.

In Henry VI, Shakespeare wrote “First you kill all the lawyers.” The authors of Project 2025 understood why that’s wrong. First you kill the rule of law.

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Discarding Medical Ethics

There really is no way to ignore the White supremacist and patriarchal roots of MAGA and the Trump administration. The behavior of ICE in conflating Brown skin with “illegal” status is one aspect; the bigoted nature of so many Trump’s insane Executive Orders is another. A recent federal court decision–handed down by a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan–expressed astonishment at the obvious discriminatory motive behind the administration’s NIH cuts. Etc.

Now, the administration is encouraging the VA to be “selective” in providing medical care to veterans. According to a recent report from The Guardian,

Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump.

The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.

Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all veterans remain entitled to treatment. But individual workers are now free to decline to care for patients based on personal characteristics not explicitly prohibited by federal law.

Language requiring healthcare professionals to care for veterans regardless of their politics and marital status has been explicitly eliminated.

I sent this article to my cousin, a long-time cardiologist whose medical knowledge I sometime share on this site; he responded that this “goes against all the rules that guide the medical profession, not to mention against the guiding principles of this entire nation! It’s simply additional confirmation of Trump’s insanity, not that we needed it! “

According to the report, this permission of discrimination isn’t limited to patient care. “Doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity.” The changes even apply to chiropractors, nurse practitioners, optometrists, podiatrists, licensed clinical social workers and speech therapists.

The administration claims that these changes were intended to support the president’s executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. That executive order purported to eliminate existing government protections from transgender people, and since it was issued, the VA has stopped  providing most gender-affirming care.

The administration has also forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.

The article quoted a former VA administrator who said the changes would allow doctors to refuse to treat veterans based on the reason they were seeking care, including allegations of rape and sexual assault. Refusal could also be based upon current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and on personal behaviors like alcohol or marijuana use.

Most Americans fail to recognize just how extensive the VA is. The Department of Veterans Affairs operates the nation’s largest integrated hospital system; it has more than 170 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, employs 26,000 doctors and serves 9 million patients annually. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that rule changes of this sort are likely to have profound consequences.

In an emailed response to questions, the VA press secretary, Peter Kasperowicz, did not dispute that the new rules allowed doctors to refuse to treat veteran patients based on their beliefs or that physicians could be dismissed based on their marital status or political affiliation.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, a prominent medical ethics expert, called the new rules “extremely disturbing and unethical.”

The changes are part of a larger attack on the independence of medicine and science by the Trump administration, Caplan said, which has included restrictions and cuts at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, last week fired every member of a key panel that advises the government on vaccines. The Guardian has earlier reported on a VA edict forbidding agency researchers from publishing in scientific journals without clearance from the agency’s political appointees.

Just one more drop in the ocean of ignorance and “othering” that characterizes MAGA and Trumpism. From the “very fine” people Trump insisted were among the bigoted rioters at Charlottesville, to his description of (majority Black) “shithole countries,” to his efforts to bar entry into America from Muslim countries, to his constant manifestations of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, Trump has represented and ingratiated himself with the White “Christian” supremacists who form the base of his support.

America’s divisions aren’t political. They’re moral and ethical. And MAGA is on the wrong side of that divide.

 
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