The huge non-MAGA base is frustrated and angry with the craziness we experience every day by this administration. Where is Schumer and Jeffery's? Where is the democratic leadership fighting all this carnage? I don't see a blue wave in 2026 if we have to depend upon the democratic leadership firing up the base.
I was watching an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was talking about how the child mortality rate in 1800 was 469/1000 before age 5. And then he said, "And the most amazing thing? Everyone was eating organic."
Boris Johnson's government in the UK successfully pursued a very OWS-ish strategy with the Vaccine Taskforce, which gave us the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Taskforce I think it's the kind of bold, swing-for-the-fences strategy that only a high-variance leader like Trump or Johnson would consider.
This is an example of what I've been saying all along: as much as I loathe Trump, he isn't the problem; he is the symptom.
Hell, I was happy to give Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed. At the end of his first term, when people said, "What did Trump ever do that was good?" I would say "Well he did Operation Warp Speed, that was good."
But his MAGA base didn't want that; they wanted conspiracy theories about how mRNA vaccines are an evil plot by the Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton-backed Jewish cabal hoping to inject us with microchips and steal our precious body fluids. And Trump caved to the idiots in his base instead of taking a stand for once and even *trying* to change their minds.
And now we're stuck with Bobby Brainworm at HHS.
That's the most depressing thing: even after Trump eats the Hamberder of Destiny (may that happy day come soon, please Flying Spaghetti Monster), we are still stuck with Trump voters.
We absolutely have to figure out some effective counter-propaganda to convert enough people away from the MAGA side. I have no idea how.
A lot of that was a basic contrarian response to vaccine mandates. People who once complained about how long drugs took to reach market suddenly became very concerned about the lack of safety checks on this novel drug technology. The vaccine being somewhat overhyped didn't help in that regard.
The medium-term hope I have is a decent chunk of Trump-only voters will disappear back into the non-voting ether the moment the choices are JD Vance, Marco Rubio, et al instead of the rich guy from TV.
mRNA vaccines make it less likely that governments will respond to the next respiratory pandemic by restricting civil liberties for months on end. If you have a vaccine in production once the genome has been sequenced, you can vaccinate the vulnerable pretty quickly. There is a risk that governments will try to restrict civil liberties until the vaccine is available, but it it’s going to be available soon, not many vulnerable people will be exposed before the vaccine is available. The crank left will probably call for restrictions and float ridiculous ideas (like it’s airborne AIDS)about the next pandemic virus, but they are less likely to be listened to
They can try to restrict civil liberties, but there's going to be a really significant uprising this time. I'm amazed at how steaming mad a lot of people are STILL about mask mandates. Civil unrest will be a very real problem unless the disease is such that everyone who gets it actually dies right away.
TBH, I have been pestering someone at work for wearing a mask after getting COVID a few days ago. I even asked her to take it off around me. I realize I am irrationally annoyed by this (and I did mask when generally required to during the pandemic).
I think you're right. I just hope it doesn't get violent and the health departments back down. And that resistance is going to come from the left as well as the right. I'm still really angry about mask mandates, but my state kept them in place everywhere indoors and technically some outdoor locations into spring of 2022. The healthcare settings mandate didn't go away until spring of 2023 and up until it went away, the state was sending letters to speech therapists who did maskless speech therapy threatening to revoke their licenses. I've met other liberals who are mad about mask mandates too, in some cases because they think they were played for a fool.
I appreciate the impulse to give credit to Trump for doing something right by praising one thing he didn’t do wrong, but that leads to exaggerating the effect of OWS. Two mRNA vaccines of approximately equal effect were made available within a week of each other. One (Moderna) was developed with support from OWS. The other (BioNTech-Pfizer) was developed and manufactured without OWS support. (The US did have an advance purchase agreement for doses, like many other countries.) Then there was the intermediate case of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that was developed independently, but received OWS funding to expand production capacity. It was never used in the US, but played a significant role in 2021. The point is, OWS was definitely a good thing, but ultimately the end of the pandemic wouldn’t have looked drastically different without it.
When the next pandemic hits, America is going to find itself begging China for access to vaccines. And, when that does happen, it's going to be a huge embarrassment, especially if China decides to make the U.S. wait in line behind a bunch of 3rd-world countries it's on better terms with.
Jay Bhattacharya's (current NIH director) editorial defending this policy in the Washington Post is the most craven thing I've seen someone put their name to in a long time. It basically boils down to, "Joe Biden mandated vaccines, which reduced public trust, and mRNA vaccines can have unexpected effects (even though this also true of the viruses their intended to protect against). So we have to cancel this research because the public doesn't trust it enough." Loathsome
Tyler Cowen suggested he believes in the conspiracy that the Covid vaccine was delayed until after the 2020 election. This was in his interview with Annie Jacobsen. Does anyone else here believe this?
It's kind of ironic that this is a theory that the administration can't pursue because it would force them to acknowledge the vaccine was a good thing.
That seems impossible to even know as the people who think it was delayed are the same people who didn't want the vaccine because it was insufficiently tested. If you think it was delayed then you have to think it was sufficiently tested before the release date. If you think it was not tested sufficiently then it should have been delayed even longer.
"The Biden administration developed a good proposal for pandemic prevention that they sadly half-assed their advocacy for, because it had to play second fiddle to the groups’ spending priorities."
I don't have any reason to doubt Matt's reporting on a dynamic change in Democrat's relationships with its groups.
But Biden should have been able to do his own advocacy as well, but he was incapable of doing that due to being unfit to serve. Democrats have to own up to this if they ever want to gain back public trust.
Read Original Sin if you don't believe me. He was brain dead. He didn't recognize GEORGE CLOONEY at a fundraiser Clooney himself hosted FOR Biden. In addition to being the most recognizable face in Hollywood, especially for older people, THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS FOR DECADES.
I remember Biden and Harris, in 2020, saying they wouldn’t take Trump’s vax. I also remember PFE delaying good vax test results until after the election. I remember masks couldn’t help you until Fauci decided that they did. I remember gatherings outdoors were bad, until there were George Floyd demonstrations that were AOK. There’s been a lot of partisanship on both sides that has diminished faith in the institutions.
Unfortunately, your comment is mostly correct. Harris never got enough static for her 2020 vaccine comments, and the "protests are OK akshually" was atrocious.
Broadly, there is a tendency to treat science as an institution rather than as the process of learning about the universe through observation and experimentation.
I've yet to hear a convincing case that Bidens policies were bad. The answer I usually get is Biden is bad because Woke.
And since we now know that Republicans think Woke and DEI means letting minorities and women have jobs, it is not much to deduce that conservatives would not even consider Harris.... For some reason...
refusal to pull back unspent stimulus money when inflation started accelerating
Afghanistan
Everything bagel regulation and red tape that interfered with stuff actually getting built
and yes Trans/DEI stuff.
Hiring/not hiring someone because of their race/sex is discrimination. Rank and file Dems know this which is why efforts to allow it failed in liberal CA even as Dem elites keep pushing it.
I don't think that's the same statement as "because Kamala is a Black woman". I think they had concerns about her actual policy/cultural positions. You don't seem to share any of their concerns, but that won't help convince them.
Preach!
mRNA vaccines can also potentially cure autoimmune diseases. Another whole field of disease that we'll continue to be plagued by thanks to MAGA.
MAGA cesspools? Nice.
The huge non-MAGA base is frustrated and angry with the craziness we experience every day by this administration. Where is Schumer and Jeffery's? Where is the democratic leadership fighting all this carnage? I don't see a blue wave in 2026 if we have to depend upon the democratic leadership firing up the base.
With the metric ton of bad news and "uggghhhh how can he get away with everything and still be as popular as he is," I just thought I'd share this uplifting, beautifully unironic piece from The Atlantic about the importance of integrity: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/integrity-politics-trump-corruption/683837/
I was watching an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was talking about how the child mortality rate in 1800 was 469/1000 before age 5. And then he said, "And the most amazing thing? Everyone was eating organic."
Boris Johnson's government in the UK successfully pursued a very OWS-ish strategy with the Vaccine Taskforce, which gave us the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Taskforce I think it's the kind of bold, swing-for-the-fences strategy that only a high-variance leader like Trump or Johnson would consider.
This is an example of what I've been saying all along: as much as I loathe Trump, he isn't the problem; he is the symptom.
Hell, I was happy to give Trump credit for Operation Warp Speed. At the end of his first term, when people said, "What did Trump ever do that was good?" I would say "Well he did Operation Warp Speed, that was good."
But his MAGA base didn't want that; they wanted conspiracy theories about how mRNA vaccines are an evil plot by the Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton-backed Jewish cabal hoping to inject us with microchips and steal our precious body fluids. And Trump caved to the idiots in his base instead of taking a stand for once and even *trying* to change their minds.
And now we're stuck with Bobby Brainworm at HHS.
That's the most depressing thing: even after Trump eats the Hamberder of Destiny (may that happy day come soon, please Flying Spaghetti Monster), we are still stuck with Trump voters.
We absolutely have to figure out some effective counter-propaganda to convert enough people away from the MAGA side. I have no idea how.
A lot of that was a basic contrarian response to vaccine mandates. People who once complained about how long drugs took to reach market suddenly became very concerned about the lack of safety checks on this novel drug technology. The vaccine being somewhat overhyped didn't help in that regard.
Wait, I thought all the Jews were busy using their space lasers to commit genocide against the peace loving Palestinians people.
Boy it's hard to keep track!
The secret Jewish cabal is excellent at multitasking!
The medium-term hope I have is a decent chunk of Trump-only voters will disappear back into the non-voting ether the moment the choices are JD Vance, Marco Rubio, et al instead of the rich guy from TV.
mRNA vaccines make it less likely that governments will respond to the next respiratory pandemic by restricting civil liberties for months on end. If you have a vaccine in production once the genome has been sequenced, you can vaccinate the vulnerable pretty quickly. There is a risk that governments will try to restrict civil liberties until the vaccine is available, but it it’s going to be available soon, not many vulnerable people will be exposed before the vaccine is available. The crank left will probably call for restrictions and float ridiculous ideas (like it’s airborne AIDS)about the next pandemic virus, but they are less likely to be listened to
They can try to restrict civil liberties, but there's going to be a really significant uprising this time. I'm amazed at how steaming mad a lot of people are STILL about mask mandates. Civil unrest will be a very real problem unless the disease is such that everyone who gets it actually dies right away.
TBH, I have been pestering someone at work for wearing a mask after getting COVID a few days ago. I even asked her to take it off around me. I realize I am irrationally annoyed by this (and I did mask when generally required to during the pandemic).
I think you're right. I just hope it doesn't get violent and the health departments back down. And that resistance is going to come from the left as well as the right. I'm still really angry about mask mandates, but my state kept them in place everywhere indoors and technically some outdoor locations into spring of 2022. The healthcare settings mandate didn't go away until spring of 2023 and up until it went away, the state was sending letters to speech therapists who did maskless speech therapy threatening to revoke their licenses. I've met other liberals who are mad about mask mandates too, in some cases because they think they were played for a fool.
I appreciate the impulse to give credit to Trump for doing something right by praising one thing he didn’t do wrong, but that leads to exaggerating the effect of OWS. Two mRNA vaccines of approximately equal effect were made available within a week of each other. One (Moderna) was developed with support from OWS. The other (BioNTech-Pfizer) was developed and manufactured without OWS support. (The US did have an advance purchase agreement for doses, like many other countries.) Then there was the intermediate case of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that was developed independently, but received OWS funding to expand production capacity. It was never used in the US, but played a significant role in 2021. The point is, OWS was definitely a good thing, but ultimately the end of the pandemic wouldn’t have looked drastically different without it.
When the next pandemic hits, America is going to find itself begging China for access to vaccines. And, when that does happen, it's going to be a huge embarrassment, especially if China decides to make the U.S. wait in line behind a bunch of 3rd-world countries it's on better terms with.
Jay Bhattacharya's (current NIH director) editorial defending this policy in the Washington Post is the most craven thing I've seen someone put their name to in a long time. It basically boils down to, "Joe Biden mandated vaccines, which reduced public trust, and mRNA vaccines can have unexpected effects (even though this also true of the viruses their intended to protect against). So we have to cancel this research because the public doesn't trust it enough." Loathsome
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/12/nih-mrna-vaccines-jay-bhattacharya/
1. Work tirelessly to undermine trust
2. Trust is lowered
3. Cancel due to low trust
Tyler Cowen suggested he believes in the conspiracy that the Covid vaccine was delayed until after the 2020 election. This was in his interview with Annie Jacobsen. Does anyone else here believe this?
It's kind of ironic that this is a theory that the administration can't pursue because it would force them to acknowledge the vaccine was a good thing.
That seems impossible to even know as the people who think it was delayed are the same people who didn't want the vaccine because it was insufficiently tested. If you think it was delayed then you have to think it was sufficiently tested before the release date. If you think it was not tested sufficiently then it should have been delayed even longer.
Great point
I don't believe that. But I don't *not* believe that either.
"The Biden administration developed a good proposal for pandemic prevention that they sadly half-assed their advocacy for, because it had to play second fiddle to the groups’ spending priorities."
I don't have any reason to doubt Matt's reporting on a dynamic change in Democrat's relationships with its groups.
But Biden should have been able to do his own advocacy as well, but he was incapable of doing that due to being unfit to serve. Democrats have to own up to this if they ever want to gain back public trust.
Read Original Sin if you don't believe me. He was brain dead. He didn't recognize GEORGE CLOONEY at a fundraiser Clooney himself hosted FOR Biden. In addition to being the most recognizable face in Hollywood, especially for older people, THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS FOR DECADES.
I remember Biden and Harris, in 2020, saying they wouldn’t take Trump’s vax. I also remember PFE delaying good vax test results until after the election. I remember masks couldn’t help you until Fauci decided that they did. I remember gatherings outdoors were bad, until there were George Floyd demonstrations that were AOK. There’s been a lot of partisanship on both sides that has diminished faith in the institutions.
Unfortunately, your comment is mostly correct. Harris never got enough static for her 2020 vaccine comments, and the "protests are OK akshually" was atrocious.
Broadly, there is a tendency to treat science as an institution rather than as the process of learning about the universe through observation and experimentation.
I still wouldn’t take a vaccine that was personally endorsed by Trump but hadn’t had tests!
"Sane" Trump voters: Good points, but at least we don't have a Black woman as president...
Because that's the only reason someone wouldn't vote for Harris?
Not from the 4 years of policy mistakes of the Biden administration?
What policy mistakes?
I've yet to hear a convincing case that Bidens policies were bad. The answer I usually get is Biden is bad because Woke.
And since we now know that Republicans think Woke and DEI means letting minorities and women have jobs, it is not much to deduce that conservatives would not even consider Harris.... For some reason...
Border/immigration
refusal to pull back unspent stimulus money when inflation started accelerating
Afghanistan
Everything bagel regulation and red tape that interfered with stuff actually getting built
and yes Trans/DEI stuff.
Hiring/not hiring someone because of their race/sex is discrimination. Rank and file Dems know this which is why efforts to allow it failed in liberal CA even as Dem elites keep pushing it.
I’m sure you really believe that.
This is literally every supposedly "sane" Trump voter I know.
"Yeah, Trump doing _______, is concerning, but who else were we supposed to vote for?"
I don't think that's the same statement as "because Kamala is a Black woman". I think they had concerns about her actual policy/cultural positions. You don't seem to share any of their concerns, but that won't help convince them.