After reading this, I want to understand the steelman case for “Trump is not a cartoon villain.”. He really seems like one, and it’s hard to understand how 44% of the country supports him. I can understand not liking taxes or abortion or hippies, but this sort of unforced error boggles my powers of empathy.
I'm not familiar enough with history to compare Trump to presidents from the comical-facial-hair era, but in his second term he's easily surpassed GWB as my "worst president of living memory."
As fucked up as Iraq/Afghanistan were, they were the result of normal thought processes and GWB was legitimately trying to make the world better. Trump is almost a Captain Planet villain: doing bad things for the sake of being nasty and accruing debt in research, alliances, trust, and bureaucracy that will take a generation to fix (if we're lucky).
Trump gets credit for operation warp speed & the CARES Act. He did not mess up a good economy before covid (Mnuchin & Powell were good appointments). However, he also destroyed PEPFAR, USAID, and hollowed out most departments and agencies, politicized gov't stats, encouraged Jan 6 and pardoned the perpetrators. His leadership during covid was erratic and dangerous despite warp spped and CARES. Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses and launched a war on Afghanisttan with unclear and unachievable political objectives. He tried but failed to ruin social security. He also created PEPFAR and signed flawed but good legislation to provide pharmaceutical benefits through Medicaire. It's a close call. I say Trump is the worst President of my lifetime, and the war in Iraq was the single biggest blunder.
This very change could actually be something that enables many more deaths to happen than those under Bush. We aren't there yet - but in hindsight we'll know.
It's really astonishing how The Trump Administration seems do something (often times multiple) really bad basically every single day. If you're not glued to the news you can't even keep up with it!
That is part of how they get away with a bunch of it. It becomes too much to counter, moves the overton window, and even when there is a counter-force, the lessor ills make it through.
I can't rank Trump behind James Buchanan, a man who literally defended the Dread Scott decision and did not think he could do anything to stop the American Civil War. I'd also probably rank Trump ahead of Andrew Johnson, the guy who completely fumbled Reconstruction. Part of this is due to the times: the time period Trump is President is simply not as dire for America as the 1850s and '60s were, but some of it is also Trump himself. OWS was a superb program which saved millions of lives. Trump deserves credit for it. Some of his diplomacy has been OK.
So only 3rd or 4th worst President, and the worst since WWII by a country mile.
In a wins above replacement framework I would slot Trump between Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. There were few politicians that could have fumbled the bag as bad as Buchanan by first inflaming Northern anti-slavery and sectional feeling and then just checking out during the secession crisis.
Andrew Johnson was very bad, but looking at the end of the Grant administration he feels closer to the replacement level for the era than Trump.
That’s a fair point. In a way, James Buchanan was probably as bad as most democratic options in ‘56. I suppose Johnson was the only choice for a ‘national union’ ticket in ‘64. But both were quite bad.
Don't forget John Tyler who is the only President that was buried under a confederate flag and who was going to take a seat under their Congress. I rank Trump like the 3rd worst in that context after Tyler and Buchanan.
Are you implying that if you'd grown up on and inherited a large plantation in 1820 you wouldn't have kept the slaves as slaves? You'd give up all the servants, start tending those fields yourself, etc.
That has no bearing on whether or not owning slaves a really bad thing to do. If I said “well, if you were living in the 1940s, would you beat your wife like most people did” that doesn’t change the fact that domestic abuse is immoral.
Is that supposed to be a gotcha? Yes I do feel morally superior to people who owned slaves or beat their wives because I do not do those things. I also feel morally superior to people who kick puppies and murderers.
The more interesting question is what thing that we/you do will future generations look back at as morally repugnant and feel morally superior to us? Eat meat? Kill fetuses?
I don't know, but there will be some, we're only very very temporarily the ones at history's apex.
The argument is generally that the institutions progressives care about -- the civil service and the federal bureaucracy, the tech/biotech sector, academia and the universities, and the cultural/arts spheres -- are so rotten to the core that Trump's wrecking ball approach is not only justified but in fact the only way to induce reform. Biden (i.e. cosmopolitan progressives) forced Americans to take the COVID vaccine, mocked their interest in ivermectin-like cures, and claimed that discussion of lab leak was racist. If Trump slows down cancer research for a few years, maybe progressives will learn their lesson and be more deferential next time. Besides, if the government was subsidizing anything of value then the private sector will immediately and completely seamlessly pick up the slack, so the risk of the wrecking ball is low.
That’s similar to what I would argue in Trump’s defense. The rebuttal is that America is uniquely prosperous and relatively stable and safe, so our institutions can’t be that bad.
One ongoing frustration I have wrt Trump: I think there are major problems with a lot of our institutions. I think the public health agencies mostly came out of covid looking pretty bad, universities have beclowned themselves to do performative politics at a level that has wrecked their credibility, scientific publications and societies have put out obvious nonsense for ideological reasons. I think federal agencies are often inefficient, foreign aid was often not being spent very well, the process by which research grants are/were handed out has all kinds of problems that both waste resources and wreck a lot of important things. All these are things I share with a lot of MAGA types.
And then, the MAGA types get in, and their solutions to these problems range from hamfisted to crazy. Making federal agencies more efficient and effective is a good thing to do, but you're not doing it in a few months as an outsider with a team of clever 25-year-olds and a tendency to tweet out edicts in the middle of the night. Foreign aid programs should be measured for effectiveness and cut if they don't make the grade, but that requires figuring out what your goals are and how to measure them--stuff that will take years of work to get right. Research funding is a mess, but fixing it means understanding what's going wrong and fixing it, not taking an axe to it or switching from having the funding allocated by woke commissars to having it allocated by MAGA commissars. US health agencies lost a lot of credibility from not performing all that well during covid, but you're not going to fix any of the problems that caused that by putting a nut in charge of HHS.
It's almost a replay of 2020, when I was happy to see everyone start taking police misconduct and no-knock warrants and civil forfeiture and police militarization and such seriously, and then the whole country took a left turn into obsessing over a boneheaded theory of race as the explanation for everything and never got around to doing much about the actual police misconduct or any of that stuff.
I 100% agree. I worked as a federal appellate staff attorney, and the amount of time and effort devoted to pedantry and avoiding typos was excessive. However, I would rather over invest in copy editing than destroy a reasonably functional judicial system that had done a reasonably effective job at avoiding judicial corruption, show trials and political prosecutions.
One issue is it’s very difficult to have an inclusive conversation about efficiency. Few people are good at tradeoffs between conscientiousness and speed, and very few people know enough about the workings of government to have sensible ideas. Civil service reform is inherently an elite project, and too many of our elites have been captured by an ideology that makes them unacceptable to the median voter.
I also think there's a lot that could be reformed in the US. But it seems like you think the only thing that really matters is "woke", which is exactly the meme-complex that got us Trump. I'm glad that you're not so far gone as to be unable to grasp how bad things are, but get that poison out of your head before it wrecks your ability to even see that.
No, I think dysfunction is bad. I think spending our foreign aid budget and research grant money badly is bad and that we should try to do it better. I think inefficient government operations are bad and we should try to do better. I wish the Trump administration was actually working to improve those things in some way that had some hope of bearing fruit.
Similarly, I think police corruption and abuse are bad, civil forfeiture is legalized robbery, and like 95% of uses of dynamic entry raids by the cops are taking crazy risks with the lives of normal citizens. I don't think everyone switching over to a grand Teaching Moment on Race instead of focusing on these issues actually solved many problems. Ahistorical think pieces about how policing was white supremacist weren't just dumb, they also spent the public interest on police reform in a way that never got around to solving many of the actual solvable problems.
As best I can tell, universities, prestigious media organs, and scientific societies beclowned themselves on behalf of woke ideas, not only because many people within those organizations believed in those ideas, but also because they mostly don't have any resistance to bad ideas and will follow whatever the powerful people are saying, or whatever their internal factional politics require. That's why the same universities who were all about social justice in 2020 are now bending the knee to Trump--they're the same spineless creatures they were in 2020, it's just that a different faction holds the whip hand now. Five years ago they were Kendi's men, a year ago they were Kamalas, and now they are Trump's. Whose will they be on the morrow?
I think it can simultaneously be true that the real issue was police abuse, that many of us cared deeply about this, that the right worked very hard to turn this into an issue of “woke” so that reform wouldn’t need to happen, and that the result is that we have a President determined to make the police totally unaccountable and turn them against the citizenry. This is not a very hard story to tell, because it happens to be the truth.
There were certainly people talking on Twitter about “woke” and Universities did some performative stuff. I’m just saying that when I look at the “woke” issue, what I see is one side doing powerful, obviously, immediately harmful and consequential things in the name of “fighting woke” and another side mostly just saying words that don’t have much impact on my life outside of social media. The fact that we’re in this mess is because people decided these threats were remotely of the same magnitude, and we’ll get out of it when people are able to balance threats more reasonably (if ever.)
Yeah, I think the way this goes is I then cite a lot of polling showing trust in institutions has been on a steady decline with a particularly sharp drop after the pandemic, the increase in mental health issues and concerns especially in young generations, the "deaths of despair" and loneliness literature, etc.
Then you cite objective measurements showing that quality of life is actually going up, Americans are generally wealthier, crime is decreasing, people are buying more and larger homes, and have more in savings (especially during the pandemic).
At that point, if I'm particularly conspiratorial, I simply argue that your statistics have been "cooked up" and should not be trusted over lived/subjective experience (perhaps I even send you a twitter thread or a blog post with a DIY statistical analysis showing crime has been underreported or whatever).
If I'm less conspiratorial, I argue that lived experience is ultimately what matters, and that Trump explicitly ran on a platform of degrading the objective measurements (particularly those in blue states and those respected by progressives) in exchange for an improvement in subjective measurements (particularly those in red states and respected by conservatives) and ... well, he won twice (or maybe three times) so who is really the cartoon villain here?
My brother once brought up the idea of an internet data tax to combat doomscrolling and constant video streaming. It's a weird idea from the jump, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes: most people face incredible diminishing marginal returns with internet data usage.
The highest-value internet uses mostly don't require much data. I buy data-only SIM cards when travelling; high-value internet tasks like maps, translating, WhatsApp, and Uber usually total <1GB/day. People got along fine doing high-value internet tasks like emailing relatives, playing games, homework, and text news with dial-up modems topping out at ~25MB per hour (~600MB per day).
Low value internet use does often require a lot of data. TikTok uses close to 1GB per hour. Facebook uses about 500MB per hour. Netflix at 1080p takes about 3GB per hour.
Weird as it sounds, I think that taxing internet data would do a great deal to deter negative impacts from the internet.
(The average US household uses about 21 GB per day now. 50¢ per GB seems like a good rate to tax it.)
Is Fox New really even relevant anymore? It may be the most relevant legacy media but that's not saying much. Getting rid of the internet on the other hand...
There were plenty of mainstream voices who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was racist, but I think the USG under both Trump and Biden took it quite seriously. And honestly, by 2020, pretty much all mainstream media folks knew that accusing their opponents of being racist was this One Cool Trick for winning their arguments on the internet. They also said liking your favorite movie or book was racist and problematic. Because it got them clicks, and they'd sell their grandmother to the dogfood plant for clicks.
So if progressives would just stop being "rotten to the core," (does that include reporting the employment data accurately?) not "force" people to receive vaccines, be more respectful of their good faith doubts about the value of vaccines vis a vis home remedies and alternative hypotheses abut the origin of the next pandemic -- all good advice, of course -- we are out of the woods? Or will a whole new set of markers of Progressives be drawn up for demonization in order to retain political power?
There is probably some way to divorce the fringe health skeptics from MAGA. Remember it wasn't all to long ago this stuff was mostly leftwing coded. I don't have a clear plan - but while I don't think some solution here would convince current MAGA folk to vote D, it would be a worthwhile endeavor.
That's one of the most frustrating things. The intellectual right who know this is all bullshit and should be denouncing it are instead propogating conspiracy narratives because they're cynical libertarians with too much appetite for risk. I'm coming around to the idea that a populist left administration might be bad in the short term, but scaring these numskulls straight is more important for long-term stability.
If there is one norm I could cultivate among intellectuals, it would be an unwillingness to play along with bullshit from their own side, lie, shade the truth, or downplay evidence that is unfavorable to their side. There are people on the right who I think don't do that sort of thing (Razib Khan is an example), but most politically-engaged intellectuals very much have a side and are inclined to support their side even when their side has bad ideas or is claiming silly things.
The stuff with demonizing mRNA vaccines is just bizarre. I mean, there are real reasons you might worry about any kind of medical treatment, but as far as I can tell most people who are freaked out about mRNA vaccines don't know what mRNA is or what it does. It's a scary acronym associated with bad times during covid.
"if the government was subsidizing anything of value then the private sector will immediately and completely seamlessly pick up the slack"
So, we can count on the private sector to immediately pick up the slack on providing health care/hospitals in rural areas, money for retired and disabled people, agricultural subsidies, and natural disaster relief any day now? Good to know!
Or do you mean that if the government gets rid of these things and the private sector doesn't replace them, that means ipso facto they were not *of value*? Well then great, just get rid of them then, I'm sure nobody will notice!
I think the idea is the latter, that if the private sector doesn't step in then these investments were not worth making to begin with. Given that Trump did much better with rural and lower educated voters than Harris, and those are the voters most likely to be impacted by rural hospitals and healthcare, it would imply that they are willing to take some degradation to their objective quality of life in exchange for some improvement to their perceived quality of life.
“…improvement to their perceived quality of life” is a heck of a euphemism for “the enjoyment of seeing Trump make the libs cry.” What other “perceived improvement” could there possibly be? The booming rural economy brought about by Mr. Art of the Deal’s tariffs?
Well yes, JD Vance is promising two things: (1) your enemies in the ivory tower and the silicon valley cubicle and the green card lottery will suffer and (2) because this is a zero-sum world, that necessarily means you will benefit.
From what I've heard about herd mentality verging into cultism, folks don't wake up until there are body bags on the front porch... something like that. Even so, you'd think the amount of conservatives who died from Covid would elicit a more measured reaction than supporting RFK.
Eh, that seems to be pretty much the historical norm for pandemics. As was discussed during COVID, the Spanish Flu pandemic pretty rapidly vanished from public consciousness once it was over, as did many other previous pandemics/epidemics. (Tangentially related, Matt wrote about the 1889 "Russian Flu" here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/covid-1889 )
I don't feel like that's a fair characterization of the argument in that post. Rationalists were generally ahead of the curve in anticipation of covid and execution of appropriate mitigations. But there's a certain very loud and unrepresentative minority* of MAHA-ish cranks that orbit the rationalist sphere (as any space dedicated to not pre-excluding heretics inevitably attracts heretics), and occasionally Scott charitably tries to address those concerns. Which leads to somewhat-silly-seeming posts defending Really Obvious Things that Everybody Knows, but that's what it means to actually address a crank argument seriously rather than the usual social-shaming tone-policing type rhetorical dismissals. Like, this is the guy who infamously spent heroic amounts of effort and social capital wading through the ivermectin literature to see if there was something, anything at all to salvage from that swamp of epistemic bullshit. The excess covid deaths post is similar, walking through the common crank claims of Why You Shouldn't Trust The Official Statistics and...finding there's just not much there, there. Crucially though, it still ends with an open invitation to Prove Me Wrong, rather than a wholesale dismissal of the line of inquiry as Settled Science. I.e. the opposite of declaring the opposition wrongly cringe for even bringing the topic up.
*Like the SB commentariat, ACX's peanut gallery has drifted rightward over the years, due to shifting selection effects for who bothers to comment. Community surveys continue to show the actual readership as a whole still skews towards bland anodyne liberal squish though.
I think the MAHA cranks used to orbit the place. Then they (and some alt-right folks) settled into the comment section and drove a lot of the really smart people away while giving themselves a huge platform (since the open-minded blogger *has* to take their concerns seriously.) And now it's a place that has to run periodic posts reminding the commentariat that actually, a deadly virus killed a lot of people. And that description is the best case. The worst is that the same contagious reasoning incapacity that created the MAHA folks has already claimed more victims from among the relatively inexperienced autism-spectrum people who participate in that community.
We live in a time where conspiracy theories are overcoming rational thinking, with grave implications for our national survival. One might hope that a "rationalist" community might offer us successful strategies to fight this. The actual evidence indicates that they've been even more successfully-colonized by those conspiracy theories than, say, the average Crossfit.
I don't know - did you read the recent Not-A-Book-Review of the ACX commentariat, which tried to analyze this (perception of) declining comment quality? Happy to fully grant that there's been a bit more of a Just Answering Just Asking Questions(tm) vibe versus historically, which doesn't necessarily show up qualitatively, and autists are really bad at underestimating the value of outsider perceptions. In an era of a broader worldwide right turn, one will necessarily encounter more right perspectives more freely, and counter-content aimed at same. Contrast to the heyday of SSC, where many of the Greatest Hits are explicitly hatchet jobs against SJWs and wokeism, yet the commentariat was simultaneously more lefty. Different waters to swim in for different times. For MAHA in particular, it's also somewhat an artefact of party realignment along the crankery axis - as MattY has written about, health nut conspiracism used to be more bipartisan, or even strongly left-coded in certain subgenres. But the consolidation of crankery under the right wing artificially serves to inflate their seeming numbers and influence, even if in absolute terms it's still quite fringe. When left nuts aren't sparring with right nuts along non-nut-based lines, all that's left is the nuttery.
But it genuinely does seeem important to not make a base rate fallacy here, where going from 2% crankery to 4% is indeed "doubling", yet it's still 96% not-cranks. The place absolutely has not been cranked to 11. And periodic explicit defenses of Consensus Reality would seem to cut both ways with the "inexperienced" newcomers, no? Good ideas and their defenders need to periodically survive such trials-by-fire, else we all slip into the complacency of the learned. That literally is one of the key strategies on offer, to engage seriously and charitably with one's critics rather than dismiss them on unrelated "working the refs" cultural grounds or appeals to authorities they don't trust to begin with. There's a reason that, to the extent "right-wing intellectual" is not an OxiClean(tm) moron these days, an oddly high number of them still overlap with the rationalists.
My husband worked Covid icu in a hospital that would get severe cases helicoptered in from MAGA cesspools like Idaho and eastern WA. The number of people who denied that covid was real and claimed it was a hoax while demanding ivermectin/hydroxychloroquine and threatening lawsuits right before having to be put on ventilators and then dying was quite striking. They denied Covid to the end. It’s pretty offensive that we wasted so many resources on people that didn’t deserve it.
Your overall point is well-taken, but on behalf of SB star contributor and Boise resident City of Trees, I must object to describing Idaho as just a "MAGA cesspool." There are good people there too.
I don't understand why these people even went to the hospital. If they think the real treatment is ivermectin, why go to a hospital where that won't be administered?
Yep. Germans had to see their cities in flames before Hitler's popularity waned. It's tough to talk people out of their loyalty to what, for all intents and purposes, is a cult.
Even then, his support hovered around the 30s-40s, according to polling done after the war. It took generational turnover for Germany to truly turn its back on Nazism.
RFK represents MAGA's version of one of "the groups." Getting RFK on board was politically necessary for Trump (and probably helped him a lot with the Joe Rogan types), but the cost is that he got put in charge of HHS. And this then leads to some really bad policies in an area where Trump was previously relatively good. Sabotaging US public health policy and medical research funding in order to get and keep power is bad, but it seems like the normal kind of politician badness, rather than some uniquely Trumpian badness.
Since Trump can't run again (in principle....), it seems like there was no reason not to jettison RFK on day 1. What were the Joe Rogan types gonna do? Take back their vote? Vote for Democrats in the mid terms?
This isn't an indeterminate-length game where Trump needs to carefully manage the mutual obligations of feudal incidents - he can just defect now for free. He just says what is and the Republicans fall in line like the spineless worms they are.
"spineless worms" might imply there exist spineful worms. But of course there are no worms with spines. One might even say the defining feature of worms is that they are spineless.
I half agree. Compare Trump’s treatment of evangelical Christians. He needs them too, but was perfectly willing to draw lines against them on abortion, which has been their core issue for 50 years.
He could have taken the votes of Rogan cranks and then pandered to the 80+% of the electorate who like vaccines. This sort of thing and the BLS firing can’t be very attractive to chamber of commerce types or even Mormons.
There are better ways for Trump to pander to the manosphere. Crapping on liberal ideas about sexuality and dating seems a lot more electorally viable than crapping on life saving vaccines.
You know it. For the record I don’t think that she and Lirpa and Kryptogal (who are kind of the substack dating discourse hydra) are bots. Of course not. But a fair amount of the bullshit on Twatter/Facebook/reddit that starts the divisive shit that others run with and trickles up to them probably is.
Scott Alexander's excellent post "The Toxoplasma of Rage" captures a lot of what's going on there. Getting people upset is very good for keeping them watching.
Yeah, nah. One of the biggest mistakes Matt has made is assuming evangelicals recognized the strategic calculus and voluntarily moderated on abortion. I know a lot of evangelicals, that's not what happened. Republicans have a lot more control over their media ecosystem and can pick and choose who receives which message.
I’m not sure it’s normal badness to just cancel major programs like this vaccine research program. This seems like the special Trump badness that he empowered Musk to do a lot of as well.
Are there any big programs that got the plug pulled in the middle of a funding year before?
It's not like anyone thinks curing cancer is bad, but Republicans have successfully convinced a large segment of the electorate that Democrats are evil and therefore any seemingly good thing they do is a facade for something more nefarious. I Socratically interrogated a Republican friend and this is where the conversation ended up. He did not believe there were any Democratic politicians who wanted what's best for the country. They were all corrupt. What's bizarre is that he gets along better with his brother and I, both of whom are liberals, than he does with the conservative side of his family who have become somewhat estranged.
I had a friend like this, I eventually came to realize his worldview came from the perspective that if he (or his family) were in the position to abuse their power, they would. And therefore, he assumed anyone else would as well.
I kind of wonder if this is the mental framework you have to adopt to protect yourself once you've gone all-in on one of the most self-serving conmen out there.
I suppose appointing a clown to an important federal office to placate part of your faction is normal politician badness. But ideally you'd also know he was a clown and keep him on a short leash.
I don't know how common it is to see programs like this cancelled. The reasons for cancelling it seem pretty dumb as I understand things, but I'm not sure whether this is unprecedented or not.
Disagree, this is very much Trumpian badness, in the sense that Trump represents maximal polarization and will embrace literally anything that goes against the values of Biden/Democrats. I’m sure he is fine with attacking cancer research, considering how keen Biden was on promoting it.
My mental model is that identity politics is a lot stronger than people admit to. Especially Democrats. Largely because they ignore that "not a Democrat/Liberal" is by far the strongest identity out there.
This is most evident in polling that shows how unpopular Democrats are. And if you ever talk to someone in a MAGA circle, they have far more distrust of Democrats than they do trust in anything else.
Major reason why I don't think Matt's moderation prescription is going to work. Anti-Democrat has become a core identity trait for a lot of voters. The conservative ecosystem is gonna negatively polarize themselves against anything Democrats do and drag compulsively middle ground voters along with them. Trying to rewind the clock and chasing old perceptions isn't viable. There's no way out but through.
I confess this brings a dark smile to me. I don't know that I agree it is a good direction to go. Seen far too many absurd ideas from the left to get excited about it being a legit tactic.
Democrats are unpopular because they don't have a popular party head that's delivering on things people like. That'll change, and I doubt it'll even be long.
I don't know that I agree. Democrats are unpopular because Fox News was far more effective than people realized.
To get even more depressing on it, they took a scorch the earth approach. They largely focused on not trusting Democrats. But they also built up a ton of "you can't trust any government" such that they primed the pump to distrust any criticism of them. Is why they have trouble getting new leadership even in their own ranks. If you go against the line, you are immediately an outsider and they already distrust anyone that is not in the in.
Democrats are unpopular across the country right now only because they’re unpopular among Democrats are unpopular with Democrats. They’re unpopular in Missouri and Ohio because of the thing you said, but the GOP is unpopular loads of other places for the same reason.
I think this is a part of where people don't contend with just how effective Fox News was. They scorched the earth for trust in Democrats and trust in Government.
That is, I began my assertion with "not Democrat" being a big identity that they built. But "don't trust the government" is a sibling identity there, as well. Worse, it is one that many others rode the coattails on to build their audience within what would be Democratic bases, as well.
The key to my assertion is that in the places where the GOP is unpopular, it isn't like the Democrats are popular. Instead, the general scene is where the GOP is unpopular, trust in the government is similarly low.
The Dems have been popular in recent memory, and they’ve even won some elections by substantial amounts, ie the polls that matter. Right now they’re at a historical low because the left wants them to punch the GOP very hard and they haven’t been. That will change.
"it’s hard to understand how 44% of the country supports him"
It's easier to understand if you realize that people are often not that rational, especially about things that are abstractions to them and not within their immediate purview.
A lot of his voters can’t stand him but for whatever reasons (that I think are misguided, but they think are legitimate) preferred him to the Democrats. Which is why Fox News has to be drowned in the bathtub because their whole MO is nutpicking Democrats. We’re not going to get a world where there are no nuts - there are 330m people in the US - so things won’t change for the better until the alternative media ecosystem is quashed.
Simple. He's doing what he promised his voters he would do and they don't mind that he is playing roughshod with governmental and Constitutional norms.
You also have to think of the incrementalism. You don't usurp a democratic government in six months unless you are a certain Austrian with a toothbrush moustache. You gut the agencies that don't affect people and impose military policy where your ability to do so is disputed rather than illegal. Besides, why give up on democracy when it gives you the power you want? You do that when it stops being beneficial (Taiwan in reverse).
"Own the Libs" as policy is not good, but it is popular with a portion of the nation.
people are bad at this, and they are happy to idiots. people all over the world are amazing at living with cognitive dissonance - and after getting online and seeing all kinds of things we retreated back to our priors apparently.
"blue" people have their own huge blindspots, and "the groups" are especially guilty of this, for example when it comes to immigration and border security, they pushed things too far and it was enough for the the voters (egged on by the usual hate machines) to elect a rapist felon .... paved with good intentions after all.
and of course who's to say that those activists (and whoever had how much of influence) are wrong? (after all maybe the loose border and now the deportations, and long months of cruel ICE incarceration are still "better" than discouraging people from even trying, or funding various strange programs all over Central and South America to keep people from moving toward the border)
if the only moral activism is my activism, then what's really left? number go up? GDP good?
(well, the obvious answer is that exactly this is why Hari Seldon will develop the effective altruist formula, duh)
Fuck off with this "pushed too far" bullshit. It's such an empirically dead, vibes-coded way to frame things that gives reactionaries way more credit than they deserve. It's like stock watchers insisting every drop/rise begets a correction. No, current sentiments are always baked into the existing price. Just because prevailing cultural sentiments abruptly jolt one way doesn't necessarily mean a correction is coming.
I agree that it's giving them more credit than they deserve, but this is still how things are. Empirically the US is under-policed, over-intermediated, under-consolidated, over-extended, and ... on top of all that our dear median voter is easily persuaded by scare tactics from the various mainstream hate machines and eventually converts to the faith of infinite individualism with conformist characteristics.
Plus the Groups overplayed their hand for short-term results against the union of Christian settlers and slavers, and ... lost.
Again, data-wise where are those 6 million of voters? (2020 Biden 81M versus 2024 Kamala 75M) It's not just a blip.
The simple answer is that they get all their news from sources that won't tell them stuff like this. We've gone past Fox News -- when I've been in bars or hotels in red places, what you now see on the TVs is OAN or NewsMax, which if you know anything about the real world, read as some kind of grotesque self-parody, and yet they're taken as gospel.
If you try to explain this policy to them, they may insist that you're wrong; or that he's not the one responsible, it's actually the Deep State sabotaging him; or maybe that RFK is actually right and all of modern medicine is bad. The possibility of Dear Leader doing bad stuff is excluded, all evidence to the contrary is rejected.
“His political movement leaves thousand-dollar bills on the ground out of quasi-religious partisan motivation” should basically be the easiest thing about the Trump movement for us to understand.
Just so awful. And extremely dumb from an America-first / national defense perspective as well, not to mention losing out on biotech/pharma to increasingly stiff competition from China.
The point to remember about "America First"-ism is that these people have a different definition of "America" than you or I do. To them, "America" isn't our de jure institutions and citizenry. Only some de jure Americans count as "Real Americans", to borrow Sarah Palin's terminology. So their goal isn't to advance the United States' interests against China and other hostile countries. It's to advance the Real American Remnant's interests against Fake America (and China and other countries).
Real talk he will pretend to suddenly get really indignant that someone had the audacity to bring up his family and derail the question. How dare you etc. And Fox News will unironically air a hundred segments with experts telling us how barbaric and mean spirited Newsom is. Completely predictable.
And 40% of America with slop for brains will lap it up. We're cooked.
I don’t think he would articulate it, but I suspect his instinct is that mothers don’t need to be counted in the calculus. Because of him his kids are, their mother’s role is akin to captured concubine or foreign born queen whose job is to provide heirs.
All that with a dash of shallow intellectual rigor and hypocrisy.
He would absolutely pivot and claim the left is attacking him and just start gish galloping into oblivion. He will then claim that is is reverse racism or something to be asking about his family. He doesn't say much in good faith.
I don't think they all agree on the precise definition. Sometimes it's 100% racial, sometimes it isn't. Some of them don't even have a definition of who a Real American is, they only know who isn't one.
My guess is he would believe they are because they are Christian, related to JD (have some claim to his 'Real American' genetics) and have 'Real American Values' (i.e. agree with JD) then they are indeed "Real Americans". There was a recent Ezra Klein podcast on this where he played a clip of Josh Hawley saying something like "People accuse me of being a Christian nationalist...and I am"
I think JD is more racially obsessed than Hawley though. I can't see Hawley finding issue with immigrants who assimilated to Christian American culture. JD on the other hand has said plainly he thinks the longer you live here, the more American points you have
I think JD has indicated it's pretty racial. I mean he's on tape staying people who were here the longest are the most American. He's also written about how America isn't based on shared values at all, so if you can't adopt American values to become American, you're on the outside looking in.
I do wonder what he actually thinks though. His wife seems like an intelligent person who would likely be disgusted by this, but maybe she's one of those weirdos who don't think women should be able to vote. Or maybe it's all a ruse for him to get power, and then he pivots when he's president?
If it's the latter I think it's extremely stupid to think you can put that genie back in the bottle.
They are more concerned about who isn't part of their in group that they can attack than anything else. They probably consider themselves and people who support their version of white christian nationalism to be considered real Americans and everyone else just isn't. Unless they get honorarily adopted into that tribe.
This is why the future still looks bright even if bumpy. MAGAs are tremendously powerful now because they control the American political system but they don’t have the numbers to dominate the whole world forever. They are essentially a declining aristocracy, and declining aristocracies have two choices: take in fresh blood like the WASPs in America did or lose power. They can’t avoid this choice and liberals should accelerate things where they can by not cooperating with them.
This is obviously speculation combined with schadenfreude-motivated reasoning, but I imagine that in, say, 20 years going to the US from most places will require a regime of prophylactic vaccinations to protect from endemic diseases that are currently basically eradicated: measles, definitely, and, at a stretch, polio.
Anti-vax is the red line I just can't cross on the right. A lot of other issues I can squint and say "ok I see where you're getting this even if I disagree with your conclusion," but with vaccines, no. The second somebody even flirts with anti-vax stuff, I immediately question all their other positions.
Vaccines are just about the closest thing we get in the real to something unambiguously good. Being against vaccines are like being against flush toilets. The fact some people have decided that this is the thing to dedicate their lives to defeat is so depressing.
I don't have much to add here because I agree with everything both of you have said, but seeing a back and forth between "Just Some Guy" and "GuyInPlace" is pretty funny.
The way people talk about "freedom" these days, I feel like some people think it's their god-given right to take a piss wherever they please. I think the flush toilet analogy seems apt.
No, I get why they are so adamantly opposed to vaccines. They are strong, manly, tough men who never back down from a fight but there is a line and that line is apparently the ouchie that you feel when that small needle goes into your arm.
Unfortunately, on-line search results for vaccine hesitancy studies are utterly swamped by post-COVID studies, but I'd be curious as to whether prior to COVID-19 the gender gap was greater and men have negatively polarized into becoming increasingly anti-vax.
Here is the one teeny-tiny point I will concede. I look at the vaccination schedule for my little granddaughters, and it is really startling how many vaccinations kids get now. My own (handwritten!) vax records from the 1960s show measles, rubella, polio, smallpox, TDAP, and maybe a couple of others. So of course that seems the correct amount to me. Since I'm not rock-stupid, I recognize that more vaccines have been developed and if the doctors agree that it's good for the kids to get more vaccines, then okay, that's the way we should go. But it does still FEEL like a lot.
Part of the changes are due to a longer schedule for better lifelong efficacy. And the other parts are simply that they are giving vaccines against more preventable diseases.
But you bring up a great point, instead of immediately getting upset and scared that things changed from when you were a kid you realized that more vaccines have been developed and probably asked your daughter or the pediatrician. Most people now start searching and their social media algorithm plays into that fear and starts feeding them false information from influencers. As someone who works in the healthcare industry specifically rare and novel disease, you'd be surprised how much people change their mind about what is a lot when their life is on the line.
I definitely think the moms are one of the roots of the conspiracy. I had an otherwise intelligent cousin who was convinced that vaccinations had caused autism in her child. You've got the parental instinct to protect children combined with the confusion, impotence and denial that comes when we realize that modern science doesn't have all the answers.
Then of course these deeply rooted impulses get exploited. In a way, RFK himself is being exploited (I can imagine the rest of the Regime snickering behind his back: "he actually believes all his nonsense!"
It's essentially the trolley problem. Take the covid vaccine as perhaps the clearest example. For a young person, taking the vaccine has a small, but observable chance of causing myocarditis; taking the vaccine reduces the already low chance of having a severe or fatal covid infection. For most vaccines, the potential risks are unproven-imaginary works too-but the tradeoffs are the same. Take a deliberate action to reduce one risk, and you'll just have to live with it if your action causes some other harm.
I spent last night at a bar with a friend of mine who is very much a Trad Catholic. He's good natured so while we agree on almost nothing about politics we spend a good amount of time on it. Nothing at the level of specifics like this seems to matter. It's all vibes, and those vibes are still very much centered on trans issues and "medical freedom" issues like vaccination schedules (although his specific objections were not around efficacy and autism but the use of cell lines derived from fetal tissue in development, which fair enough for a Catholic).
It really underscored for me how I don't think there will be a breakthrough in our current political moment until or unless something or many things get really bad in ways that are undeniable and discrediting to the MAGA movement. Unfortunately given the degree to which they are completely unwilling to attribute legitimate criticism against Trump it will have to be really bad at least while Trump is in power. There's not much evidence among the MAGAs in my life that their loyalty extends in the same way to anyone other than Trump, so there's also a chance that the movement kind of disintegrates after Trump is off the stage, but I wouldn't count on that being a certainty.
Also reminder that Monday 9/15 is a SLOW BORING AND STEADY HABITS HAPPY HOUR AT BAR IN NEW HAVEN! 6PM. It is happening at the same time as YIMBY Town 2025 and a brand spanking new YIMBY Action chapter (YIMBY South Central CT) founded by yours truly and some friends will also be around and looking to engage.
I would even call this current schizophrenia afflicting the nation an indulgence born of complacency ---its a luxury to be able to be so petty and obsessive, and I mean that about both far left liberals and Trumpers. That's the value of a depression economy, something we really haven't had for 90 years---it flushes the crap out and makes people feel the flames of bleakness enough to stop acting like imbeciles. (But even then if we end up there I don't know if it would merely reinforce authoritarianism...empires don't last forever).
And then those same people get upset when politicians can't deliver on those fancy promises, which then breeds resentment and a whole generation of apathetic people or people who all think the system just needs to burn to the ground. Populism is frankly a cancer sometimes, and the fact that people gravitate towards those that give simple answers to complex problems.
is that good or bad? (or was that good or bad? I know Matt has a piece on FDR, and how he was not rocking the boat against the racists to keep them in the coalition, if I recall correctly)
I maintain FDR was bad. He put in place a whole lot of constitutionally dubious stuff (for example, the federal government getting to regulate the amount of wheat you grew on your own land even if you were using it only on your own land).
And his policies almost certainly made the great depression last longer.
On my cell phone, this part of your comment was buried below the fold. You might want to re-post the news about the get-together as a separate post so that it is more visible on cell phones.
“Medical freedom” is such a weird line for them to use, because most of what they’ve done is actually to start to take away medical freedom! They haven’t given anyone a right to not get vaccinated who was being mandated in the past, but they’ve started taking away people’s rights to get vaccinated or to get gender hormones or to eat red #3 or whatever.
"although his specific objections were not around efficacy and autism but the use of cell lines derived from fetal tissue in development, which fair enough for a Catholic"
Do you think that if this issue were rendered moot by technological advances, he'd drop his objection?
It's worth mentioning that the Vatican, while objecting to the particular method of vaccine development, has said it is acceptable for Catholics to get the vaccine.
Sure, but what I'm getting at is that it's not impossible that this is just a more palatable excuse (being incontestably "faith-based"), and he'd find another one if it no longer was an issue.
But I don't know Casey's friend! I'm just reading the interaction in light of the wider comment, which sort of implied that the friend's excuse was cover for a more generalized willingness to go with the MAGA flow.
Absolutely and I don't want to be too hard on my coreligionists, being a practicing Catholic myself. I just also have low patience for this sort of thing, that being the pointing to the religious doctrine to justify something it doesn't actually require. Own your crankery dammit.
This is, I think, partially due to the post-religious nature of the US; "religion" is becoming detatched from dogma or catetchism. It's a much more pronounced phenomenon among evangelicals, but I think there's a not insubstantial "trad Catholic" bloc that is all about the vibes and half-understood doctrine (incidentally, I haven't kept up with it much recently - I thought trad Catholics were really going to have their day in the second Trump administration but they seem to be still sort of on the margins, or at least that's the impression I have, e.g. JD Vance only occasionally makes Catholic-ish public statements).
I don't think this sort of thing is exclusive to religion - any belief system, religious or secular, lends itself to motivated reasoning. But religion provides an especially effective structure for bolting on religious-y sounding motivations for what are effectively secular culture war issues.
I subscribe to everything my fellow Papist InMD gave in his response, and would add that part of the Trad Catholics not quite having their day in T2 is that they are not fully independently organized outside the traditional hierarchy, and that hierarchy is really unhappy about a lot of the Trump stuff.
The hierarchy view of cuts to poor people, foreign aid, health care etc. are diametrically opposed, and they are institutionally coherent enough to not bend. My contact inside the tent reports the trad Catholics are having a hard time reconciling their “yay Trump” priors with “whoah, that’s not what we meant “
Yea, I agree that religion is a particularly convenient justification for backing into positions one already supports or is sympathetic to for non spiritual reasons.
I'm not surprised the small Catholic vibe-ocracy attached to Trump hasn't been particularly influential. If salvation is actually what someone is looking for they aren't going to find it in partisan politics, which is an inherently worldly endeavor. Which isn't to say there aren't times where religious influence on leaders isn't an important and beneficial thing, and one that can be quite underrated. However I think people like Vance are a lot more likely to make religion political (and for that matter shallow) than they are to make politics religious. Trump will never compromise for values he doesn't hold, but he will absolutely expect his lieutenants to compromise their values for him.
Exactly! Own the crank, don't use the religion shield to get out of things you just don't want to do. Using a faith based excuse should be disqualifying if it just flies in the face of facts and logic. But that is the good thing about faith based people, they can have unreasonable takes and you can't criticize them because they get to hid behind their interpretation of religion...
I asked that question specifically and he said yes. Also, he articulated the Church's position on utilizing treatments that involved "unethical" components in their development (namely, the harm being mitigated by the treatment must be sufficiently serious and there must be no other effective options) so to that end his kids all have the standard set of serious vaccines (MMR, hepatitis) while he's much more hesitant on things like chickenpox, COVID, and HPV (which he is against for additional reasons, you can probably guess).
Ugh, HPV. "Let's innoculate girls against a preventable disease that can cause cancer as a secondary effect!" "No, because then they'll have pre-martial sex." "Huh?" "No, YOUR'E a pedophile!"
I learned after one or two attempts that “OK, let’s assume your daughter is a virgin until marriage, can you be as sure about her husband never being exposed?”was not a winning argument.
It's sad that the new Catholics have so little concern for the Vatican. Here you have an org that, while flawed, can maintain some modicum of sanity. It's basically the only org preventing my parents from going totally conspiratorial.
And did he mention how he refused to vote for Trump in 2024 because Trump promised to make IVF treatments available under insurance, when IVF treatments have as a predictable side effect the destruction of lots of embryos?
Maga will never admit that they have failed or they’ve done anything wrong. No matter how bad it gets. They will find a new leader and call for the second coming of Trump.
The best thing that could've happened is for Trump to have died when he had COVID. Even then, though, I imagine the conspiracy mongers would've concocted a story of the elites intentionally killing him by denying him ivermectin.
There are trade offs between ease for certain voters v ballot secrecy.
Given that I still receive ballot at my house from residents who lived there 5 years ago it’s clear that it’s easier for those who have bothered to update their address.
Many many times. They tell me the process but unfortunately the mail system keeps on returning the ballot to me even though it’s written clearly they do not live at this address. I suspect in another decade I’ll still get those ballots.
ID yes, in person seems unnecessary. We've had mail in since like the civil war. If you want more civil engagement, you either need to provide free and easy voter ID's to everyone and make all election days holidays, with mandatory early voting options or simple make voting mandatory.
Mail in voting makes it easier at the expense of secret ballot and ensuring that voters aren’t unduly influenced. I vote via mail, at the same time as my wife, and we talk about it while we vote. I don’t see mail in voting to lend itself to free elections.
LOL - from the comments looks like a lot of us in our bubbles envy having someone with other ideas to talk to. The best I can manage to do is engage atheists once in awhile.
Does your friend ever give you details or just objections? Because to my knowledge there are no vaccines given out that contain fetal cells or tissues. So he is antivax because the technology was originally developed in a way that was morally wrong? I feel like he just likes being morally superior. There is a ton of technology we all benefit from that started due to WW2 or experiments on human beings. Also they are winning on "trans issues", so I'm not sure what more he'd want there. Did your friend not vote Republican before Trump? Like what other "medical freedom" issues does he have? Or is his issue that he can't dictate what other people do from a medical standpoint based on his beliefs? Because to my knowledge, we have a fair amount of medical freedom here in America.
I think you are right though, I think this is our current political climate for a while, until their movement may possibly get discredited. Even then though I think it'll be tough since they as a core belief never take accountability for anything and simply will never blame Trump for anything. I think as a character trait they simply believe they and those in their group are right and others are wrong.
The MAGA/MAHA turn against basically anything recommended by a medical professional makes me think that one genre of commentry that is both essentially correct and that I'm incredibly sick of is "the turn against institutions and expertise, along with all of the collateral damage that goes with that, is unfortunate but is ultimately the fault of all those pointy-head radicals in academia and journalism who mortgaged their legitimacy to pursue shiny social justice objects."
It is an accurate, albeit simplified and selective, account, but what I find insufferable is that it's just the rhetorical equivalent of "if anyone isn't free, we're all unfree." Most of the prescriptions for getting from point A to point B, or at least the ones that pundits and Substack commenters (including me, at times) make, are just slight variations of "be better." Like, okay...we'll get right on that, let you know when we're done.
I think people may be discounting how much idiots and crazy people being able to talk to each other and share videos is the biggest driver of this phenomenon. The SJW stuff was just the irritant that finally triggered the autoimmune response (or whatever tortured metaphor is appropriate).
Yeah. I think it was Derek Thompson(?) who said something like "social media was an experiment in building a room, letting everyone in, and rewarding the people who scream the loudest."
Can't remember where, but a few years ago I read an interview with an establishment Republican in one of the Carolinas who said something to the effect of "it used to be that every county-level party had a couple paranoid cranks who would say crazy stuff at party meetings that everyone just ignored. Facebook allowed all the cranks to find each other, form a caucus and then come to the state convention to create chaos."
A lot of the establishment types self-selected out and withdrew or became Bulwark Never Trumpers or Dispatch remnant conservatives. The ones with no principles like Scott Jennings and Matt Schlapp became grifters. Trump has been very good for their bottom lines.
Most of my friends and family are Trump supporters and you cannot discount the extent to which right wing media dominates social media. Most of these people don't identify as strong Trump supporters yet they're constantly sending me memes and posts from people like Benny Johnson and @the_typical_liberal.
Blaming all of this on intellectuals/technocrats is fashionable and it's good for elites to take ownership of their mistakes, but there does seem to be an unwillingness among people who talk about politics to admit how much appetite there has always been among non-elites to fully embrace anti-intellectualism. There just hadn't been a modern president who just fully gave such people their moment.
I think we need better nomenclature than “elites” too because depending on who you ask, a billionaire and his administration of billionaires, former senators, and think-tank galaxy brains would seem pretty elite. So what elite are we talking about? Educated professionals? Blue hair queer studies professors? The deep state? Anti-Israeli student protesters? The triple parentheses cabal that we’re told controls business, media, and Hollywood? Maybe we take the Rob Henderson approach and just make elite mean people I disagree with?
That's a good question. "Elite" is perhaps best thought of as a term for who controls mainstream information. There was a 5-10 year period where advertising, tech, academia, mainstream media, Disney, etc. had shifted the Overton Window to exclude things like support for law enforcement, opposition to immigration, refusal to separate gender from sex, opposition to affirmative action, and so on. Whatever the merits or lack thereof of those stances, it represented a form of elite influence since something like 40% of the country got excluded in this manner.
I’ll agree with you on some of this, but support for law enforcement in mainstream media never went anywhere. Cop procedurals and true crime are two of the largest genres in TV, literature and podcasting and have been consistently.
The argument against this goes back to a common point Matt has made, which is that some of the biggest shifts to the left in the mainstream media have come from culture/lifestyle content. There absolutely were a lot of navel gazing pieces in 2020 around "copaganda" - I remember an Alan Sepinwall column specifically rending garments around his previous love of the show "Justified." That said - you're 100% right that cop procedurals never actually went away.
Look as a former anti-SJW conservative debate bro myself, let me tell you what's really going on. Conservatives were never silenced, you could easily find communities, media, and institutions where conservative sentiments thrived. I frequented several. They just weren't as prestigious, i.e. popular among smart, important people. And as this trend gained steam and started to trickle down into the masses, that's when they went berserk because waning popularity feels like losing and losing makes people mad. Losing makes people lash out and become conspiratorial. Which is exactly what happened among conservatives.
It's no different than the losing sports team blaming the refs. Maybe you can point to a couple blown calls as Matt has done, but that's not REALLY what it's about. They're angry because they lost and they're grasping for excuses.
Right, there's an element of looking to certain cultural indicators (WaPo, NYT, etc.) instead of others in determining what the zeitgeist is - meanwhile, Blue Bloods is one of the best-performing TV shows out there. There's a certain internet narrative where tastemakers like the aforementioned outlets are considered "mainstream media" whereas the media that people are actually watching is considered a whisper in the background. Ultimately, tens of thousands people more watched Boston Blue than read Sepinwall's column, but there's still the idea that mainstream media excludes things like Boston Blue.
I agree those shows didn't go away, but my recollection is that, besides what ATX Jake mentioned, several of the shows produced some semi-cringe apologetic episodes for the following season.
I know Brooklyn 99 did for an episode, but then it went right back to being a wholesome comedy about witty cops catching bad guys. It's just strange to me that relatively small-scale lifestyle columns in liberal newspapers and individual cringey episodes of otherwise very pro-LEO TV shows are "mainstream media" while Fox News and the other 23 episodes per season of Blue Bloods, NCIS, Paw Patrol, etc. are somehow excluded. "Try That in a Small Town" was a billboard top hit (higher than any Chappell Roan)! It's like the fixation on the Ivies when the vast majority of university students go to state schools.
If mainstream media is what people widely actually watch/listen to/read, rather than just the chattering class on the internet, then it's far more centrist/right-wing than how we portray it.
-I asked ChatGPT the other day whether Azerbaijan is a Third World country. The first paragraph of its answer lectured me on how morally objectionable it is to use "Third World", before getting to the point and talking about Azerbaijan's level of economic development, political institutions, etc.
-Not only MSNBC and Variety magazine, but ABC, The Washington Post, etc., released material sympathetic to the idea that the American Eagle jeans ad was "racist", "fascist", etc.
i mean since the term third world is a reference to countries not aligned with the USSR or the US during the cold war the question seems like a bit of a category error?
Lots of crank anti-intellectual views are popular among the elite. RFK Jr is the nephew of a president and son of a senator, lots of people in Hollywood supported his views until recently. A lot more CEOs, politicians and journalists than anyone wants to admit think carrot juice is better than chemo. Elites are smarter than non-elites but all groups of people have lots of people who are just really dumb.
yes the true elite has some truly bonkers views that they are able to make work by having so much money. It's kind of like the midwit meme except the midwits are actually right/better.
It doesn't work for them, Steve Jobs delayed Chemo for 9 months to try his juice cleanse, Private Schools teach their students Growth Mindset, I am sure lots of wealthy divorces are started because a spouse receives bad advice from their astrologer.
yes true. Though I guess I mean people like Tom Cruise etc. can be parts of rather nutty religions and still have social and professional success mostly because they are huge stars who are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Yes - as much as I am loath to give credit, it's clear that there was at least some bipartisan consensus against the cranks that was maintained primarily by pre-Trump Republican party elites, which has completely collapsed.
That's of course not to say that the pre-Trump Republican party didn't have other problems.
I wonder how much of that was held together by the needs of fighting the Cold War, especially when parts of the New Left lost their minds back then and conservatives often seemed like adults (like Fukuyama not being able to relate to the hippies when he was a student). That was already starting to crack with W and the neocons.
But, if the neocons weren't "elites," then the term has no meaning. They were basically all national security academics and "experts," and what Democratic support of the war there was at the beginning was anchored by trust in the "experts."
The neocons had a bit of their own anti-expert bias though. I believe it Douglas Feith who told people who were applying to jobs at the Pentagon that knowing Arabic would be a bad thing for their career. Powell's WMD presentation to the UN was notoriously cherrypicked and received a lot of pushback internally (including some from Powell himself). The Iraq War was also unpopular among Middle East experts outside of Heritage and AEI. The neocons were this weird group in academia and think tanks that everyone else thought was weird, with the exception of Fukuyama. And that's not even getting into issues like the Bush administration's approach to climate change, stem cell research, etc.
There wasn't a bipartisan consensus against cranks, Obama wanted RFK jr at the EPA, Tulsi was vice chair of the DNC, General Flynn was Obama's director of Defence Intelligence. Trump has made things much worse, but for some reason it hasn't normally been the procedure to check if someone is balanced before giving them power.
I think the fact that even the military was considered too lib for Trump really calls into question how much something like the CDC can do to get on the "right" side of this stuff.
elites need to own their own ineffectiveness in actually transmitting their own values (even [especially?] among themselves), and also living up to them, and so on.
having the cultural bully pulpit and asking everyone to "imagine" is cringe when you live in a mansion. (in case of Hollywood elites it's literal mansions, in case of academia it's tenure, for the press it's a captive audience, for doctors it's a all of the above - but mostly being shielded from the cost-ineffectiveness of their work, and so on.)
and in general cost-benefit aspects completely ignored for decades in the Amazing All American enterprise. (War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on War, War on Racism, and now the latest installment War on Woke)
Sure, but this is kind of an example of what I'm talking about: "a large socio-professional fraction needs to change their behavior" is fine as far as it goes, but it's pretty tired at this point and it's not really a theory of change.
do you mean it's not an effective recipe for guaranteed success, or do you mean that it's a bad theory because it doesn't explain anything (or because of other reason(s))?
Largely the former. Admonishing a large and diverse group to change their ways, especially when those ways are bound up in socioprofessional identity and esteem, is just not easy to do.
As I say, it's not inaccurate - a large socio-professional fraction really did collectively get out over their skis and thought of their position as self-evidentially righteous - but I guess see above for why pointing this out over and over is not really going to convince them to change accordingly.
I think where it gets hard is defining elites--I think some people think of elites as those who do set the agenda, meaning media executives, big firm lawyers, top consultants, senior firm managers, etc. (maybe 2% of the population or less). Others just mean any old professional with a college degree or anyone on that track (maybe 30% of the population or more).
I know that with college educated parents I interact with there is a ton of "value transmission" mostly around trying to help your kids navigate difficulties with school and screentime. It is true that Democrats as a policy matter are less comfortable than Republicans in espousing personal habits as a solution to things (there is much more comfort in blaming systemic issues).
But I do wonder if this will change as historically conservative suburban professionals exit the Trump GOP.
Strong disagree. I distinctly remember the GWB administration going hard against any concept of expertise and academic life, while telling us government is the problem and the bureaucracy is useless. I doubt many of them really believed it - they all went to Ivy Leagues. This was pre-woke, when gay marriage bans were popular across the states.
The chickens have come home to roost! True believers run the show now. The Trump personal loyalty aspect escalated things, but the seeds were there.
A completely ignored but quintessential attribute of the "experts" is that they have a strong inclination for self policing. NYTimes issues lots of retractions while Fox News issues none. MAGA takes this as evidence NYT is wrong and Fox is not.
The Iraq War as a classic instance of the Bush administration disdaining and ignoring expertise in favor of blind ideological agendas. It rejected the dense, exhaustive State Department study of Iraq and the challenges of regime change, it had Rumsfeld tossing out all the recommendations (e.g., regarding force size) experts in DoD were pushing him to adopt as the deployment took shape. It made sure that no expert or anyone with any area expertise was allowed anywhere near the Coalitional Provisional Authority in Baghdad after the initial phase of the war.
Of course, countering that was the cool, calm and professional approach the administration took toward Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.
The thing about the Iraq War was that even not very bright me, two weeks into a geopolitics of the Middle East course, was like “this seems like a terrible idea.” All you have to know is that there are Shiites, and Sunnis, and they don’t care for one another, and already that puts a huge hole in the “Iraq will function perfectly well in the absence of a strongman dictator” thesis.
[White House. 9:00 PM. George W. Bush in flannel pajamas reading in bed next to his wife]: "Laura, get a load of this! You ever hear about that dang Spanish Flu? No bueno! Gonna call Turd Blossom first thing in the AM!"
Sometimes I wonder if RFK Jr and his ilk even believe in germs or viruses or cancer. They all seem to think that disease is the product of moral failings: eat impure foods, don’t get enough sunlight, too fat. Sure, our behaviors have impacts on our health! Nobody doubts that. But it seems like all they care about is scolding people into a healthy lifestyle and buying nutritional supplements. That says to me they don’t think germs are real.
Totally - much like conspiracy theorists they can't deal with the fact that sometimes random bad things happen and no one is to blame. Every bad thing must be intentionally caused by someone.
Did you hear Lilly's husband died? No. What happened? Brain tumor apparently. He was only 42.
What actually happened? In some cases a random cosmic ray hit a strand of DNA causing a mutation that led to the cancer. But then that means a random cosmic ray could hit my DNA and I could just die. It's far more comforting, for some people, to believe that Lilly's husband just wasn't eating clean and getting enough exercise. Or that big business or big pharma conspired to cause the tumor.
It sure as shit can't be that random shit happens and you get a headache and go the doctor and they find a giant inoperable brian tumor.
Having the misfortune to have a conspiracy theorist as a mother-in-law, I can confirm that there are definitely people who do not believe in viruses. (I've never encountered any reference to someone not believing in "cancer" as such though. They just attribute it to wacky things.)
Bacteria, yes, at least implicitly, because it's a big deal to use alcohol-based cleaning products to disinfect surfaces and I can't recall her ever posting anything against taking antibiotics. Prions, I don't know, because prion-caused diseases haven't been in the news much in the time I've known her.
There are tons of people who believe in "cleansing" their body of toxins through some combination of extreme diets, saunas (sweating out the toxins), OTC supplements, etc. Heck, Steve Jobs -- not a dumb guy -- tried to treat his pancreatic cancer with fruits and vegetables, herbal remedies, juicing and bowel cleansing.
There are a lot of people who don't believe in medical science and think they can self-diagnose and self-medicate themselves more effectively than their doctor.
The weird thing is that during the pandemic, being anti-miasma-theory is why the medical establishment was so slow to endorse masking - it’s all the cultural memory of the miasma people being so wrong about Semmelweis and handwashing, that they couldn’t believe that anything but handwashing was relevant. It’s a shame that the actual proponents of miasma theory didn’t follow it to the conclusion that masks are useful.
Eh, I wouldn't say it's anti-miasma theory (unless you think intra-discipline debates about aerosolized droplets vs "airborne" are the anti-miasma theory that became entrenched).
I think the fatal flaw was over-indexing on pan flu scenarios, which is what most people in public health thought would be the Big One. Handwashing would have been really great advice if we were facing pan flu. Since it's costless/cheap, we should run out handwashing recommendations immediately for any novel infection.
People also like to say NPIs/other nonvax precautions were pointless during covid, but I'd encourage people to go look at flu deaths during the same period as the pandemic. The stuff we were doing really would work for pan flu, it was just not the right approach for a different virus. Covid is an annoying virus to deal with.
Yeah, Linsey Marr convinced me that a lot of the early mistakes about droplet size and aerosols got entrenched because of how they fit nicely with anti-miasma theory.
I’m skeptical that hand washing is very effective for flu either - I just suspect that the mild social distancing and bit of masking that even incautious people were doing in 2020 was reducing the transmissibility of everything respiratory by a factor of 2 or 3, and covid just had a much higher transmissibility due to a completely immunologically naive population.
I think we have pretty good evidence handwashing works for flu and other viruses like noro, but it's definitely not sufficient on its own to prevent transmission at the population level.
And I think I understand what you mean by anti-miasma theory now with the Linsey Marr reference; she was part of the (correct) side during the airborne vs droplets war. This takes us to a different place and sort of intra-field dynamics in PH, but infectious disease people were the main proponents of the droplet side, whereas environmental folks were on the airborne side pushing for things like HVAC throughput. For better or worse, infectious disease people rule public health and hold all the levers, so they won all the early debates until it was obvious they were wrong, to our detriment.
But noro isn't an enveloped virus, so handwashing isn't as effective as it is for flu or COVID. It's better than not washing, but some germs still remain unless you stick your hands in Clorox for a few minutes (which is inadvisable).
There were a number of people, including a handful in this very comment section, who were 'cautiously optimistic' about RFK's tenure, that he would be hemmed in on drug regulation by pharma lobbyists and general pro-business Republican opinion, and would instead focus on things like banning red 40 and launching investigations into microplastics and stuff.
This was always foolish. It is bad to give morons power, and even worse to give conspiracy-minded crank morons power (and still worse to give power to conspiracy-minded crank morons who have had pieces of their brain eaten by a worm, but i digress...)
I am reminded of an article Milan wrote where he mentioned a few young people he knew and their various political opinions, and one of them was a seemingly smart young guy who supported RFK for president because of Health. I do not know what is the deal with Health (capitalized because Health as some sort of symbolic-religious object of veneration is clearly not the same thing as the health studied empirically by medical researchers) but it keeps oneshotting otherwise normal people and turning them into fools who are trusting of conspiracists and excessively skeptical of everyone else, as though 'eat healthy and work out' was arcane advice that had been hidden from them by the occult priesthood of science which can never be trusted again now that they know the Forbidden Truth of going to the gym and cutting out junk food.
I was never "cautiously optimistic" about RFK, Jr., but I am still genuinely shocked at the number of major industries in a variety of sectors that have just instantly rolled over and died on the spot without even a peep.
The thing is that the ex ante case for RFK not doing stupid things doesn't look that dumb: he adds no particular value to Trump's political coalition post-election (no need to cater to the marginal crank vote during a second term), and Trump is obsessed with catering to perceived market desires. The surprising thing isn't that RFK is a crackpot, it's that he's a crackpot being given an arbitrarily long leash despite this being genuinely bad for Republican- (and even Trump-)favored constituencies without any obvious payoff.
It doesn't even work on the level of vibes because pre-election Trump was, if anything, happy to claim *credit* for vaccines and thus (unlike with solar and wind) there's presumably no personal animus at play to counterbalance this failure of the kind of low cunning instrumentalism that is the one thing he's extremely competent at.
The long leash is because of RFK's last name. Trump's brain is stuck in 1987, and back then in NYC, "John John" was like the prince of the city. Having a Kennedy nominally on side probably does something to his ego.
I think this is downstream of consolidation. When a company does something like JUST RNA, they need to not be banned to survive. If a company does RNA vaccines and a dozen other things, better to sacrifice the RNA wing and not draw the ire of powerful people to punish them. It is very corrosive.
Probably not quite kosher, but every time I see a photo of RFK I think "A man's face is his autobiography" and wonder what the heck he's done to get that face...
I've always been skeptical of giving Trump so much credit for OWS, and reading through this article just confirmed this prior. Trump has always cared mosr about what will sate his ego and make him look good and be praised. And while he was being lackadasical with the pandemic in general, opposition to pandemic caution was very much naturally occurring muchnmore among Republicans, something that I think was always baked in. Even when Trump tried to save his ego by claiming how great "his" vaccines were, he would get pushback from his most loyal MAGAs. It's not surprising he's gone down the road he has in this regard when seeing the resistance in his base.
Also, while it's tempting to just invoke Cleek's Law (today's Republican thought is the opposite of what Democrats want today: updated daily), I do think Democrats need to seriously purge and criticize the strain of degrowther ascetic thought that sometimes permeates through. Matt listed a bunch of examples of how suspicious some people are of Democrats demanding sacrifice in quality of life for causes that many people don't share. By making sure they're not going to be excessively haughty over those things, it'll help build better credibility when a real and sudden need to practice short term sacrifice is warranted.
"demanding sacrifice in quality of life for causes that many people don't share" isn't just limited to degrowthers. It is also a feature of fanatics around lots of causes -- environmentalists, evangelicals, animal rights, abortion.
People who prioritize telling others (either through hectoring or legislating) how to live and what to buy generate more backlash and are generally people I try to avoid. I prefer the ones who try to put forth convincing arguments instead.
Agreed--I tried to be more inclusive with "Matt listed a bunch of causes", and you added a few more here that are on the other end of contemporary partisan divides.
Maybe I'm a fanatic, but I've been demanding (or at least suggesting) sacrifices that might accrue if Portland sticks to its sanctuary city status in defiance of DOJ's threatening letter of August 13. Also trying to come up with ways we can collectively mitigate the harms to vulnerable populations arising from the shut-off of federal grants.
Stuff like this is why I’m increasingly convinced that we absolutely need the economy to nose dive into stagflation to save the country. Because I think I’m on solid ground saying inflation numbers being not great but not yet disastrous and unemployment numbers being the same is what’s keep the floor so high on Trump’s support*.
There are depressingly a lot of candidates for the worst possible long term outcomes of this administration but the havoc being wrecked by RFK Jr. is to me top of the list. Assuming we still have fair elections in 2026 and 2028 (I’m increasingly worried about that with this military gambit in DC) we can undo a lot of the dumbest Trump policies without horrible damage.
But there will be countless number of people unnecessarily dead because of RFK Jr’s insanity. And stuff like this is where I have the absolute least amount of sympathy for Trump fans. I’m 100% with Matt that Dems need to flip at least a small number of Trump voters to win the senate and 2028 presidency. So to that end, I’m for candidates being moderate where appropriate and being “respectful” to marginal Trump voters. But right now? I’m not running for office. I’m not trying to reach marginal voters. So my chance to yell into the void. Fuck you hardcore Trumpers. Sorry not sorry that a blue haired lefty living in Brooklyn you never met got too over their skis about trans rights on Twitter. So Biden administration was being a bit too solicitous of super left gender stuff in public pronouncements. This means we need to have thousands of people unnecessarily die in the coming years when there could have been vaccines for them? Is this really what you wanted?!
* The CPI numbers were not nearly as positive yesterday as the stocks market would imply (they were good enough that a rate cut is more likely so stocks appropriately went up). Core and super core inflation is ticking up. Shelter inflation and energy kept CPI down (the former is a big part of why CPI inflation may be muted next 12 months). Businesses so far are laying off workers in response and trying to hold off price increases. This can’t last.
Speaking of laying off workers. Hey GOP donor community. There is no way not having monthly BLS data is good for your business. There is no way an absolute garbage hack from Heritage foundation is good for business. You have any sway with senators now is the time to use it.
I just learned that the husband of an acquaintance was approached about being the head of BLS. The husband is a rock-ribbed conservative and very deeply Catholic, but he's not stupid. He would have been so much better. But of course he didn't want to work with the Trump administration. 😭
Before, it could be argued that serving in the administration would perhaps help keep policy on a relatively normal track. Not anymore, unfortunately. If the husband had taken the job and done it properly, he might well have been publicly fired too, after considerable personal sacrifice. Nice to see that there are still some people out there who call themselves “conservative” and actually are.
What frustrates me most about the selfish, nihilistic MAGA worldview is that they completely miss the power of collective action. They don’t understand that when we pool our resources, or vaccinate to create herd immunity, or—simply put—work as a team, we create better outcomes for EVERYONE, themselves included.
Honestly, I’ve pretty much had it with their petulance.
It’s high time for like-minded states to band together and (re)create institutions that allow us to act collectively for the public good. If EPA, FEMA, NIH etc can’t work at the federal level anymore, we should to find a way to create alternative super-state (but sub-national) structures for institutions like them, even if that means cutting out some states from disaster insurance or cutting edge medicine.
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."
Let's do a quick counterfactual: what if there had there been neither government shutdowns, nor government welfare, nor bailouts, nor forbearance of evictions, foreclosures and cancellations.
Over and above the economic catastrophe that all the additional deaths would have caused, enough people would have quietly stopped going out to put establishments out of business. The business owners and their employees would have just been SOL. (Shit-Outta-Luck.) Landlords and mortgage holders, for all their bitching about the eviction moratorium, would have been SOL in turn. Cellphone and broadband providers, cable tv, streaming services, everyone would be SOL without the coordinated effort to assign blame, align expectations and provide the emergency relief that was needed and widely know to be needed..
The depression would have lasted far longer and far worse. It would never have recovered until years after population growth resumed its 3% trend. And more billionaires would own an even more outlandishly outsized slice of everyone else's pie, having bought up even more assets and even lower fire sale prices.
Per dysphemystic treadmill reposting as separate comment fo visibility:
Also reminder that Monday 9/15 is a SLOW BORING AND STEADY HABITS HAPPY HOUR AT BAR IN NEW HAVEN! 6PM. It is happening at the same time as YIMBY Town 2025 and a brand spanking new YIMBY Action chapter (YIMBY South Central CT) founded by yours truly and some friends will also be around and looking to engage.
In politics you expect to see rational argument, corruption, short sightedness and self interest, but so much of politics in every part of the ideological spectrum is driven by total lunatics.
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.
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.
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.
Relatedly, the NIH director Jay Bhattacharya just published a ridiculous op-ed in the Washington Post giving his justification for why the NIH canceled mRNA research. It confirms what I had long suspected, that he is partisan hack with crank medical beliefs.
I forget if this article already posted here but I have a very hard time figuring out what is going on with Bhattacharya. Idk if he is totally radicalized or just weak:
After reading this, I want to understand the steelman case for “Trump is not a cartoon villain.”. He really seems like one, and it’s hard to understand how 44% of the country supports him. I can understand not liking taxes or abortion or hippies, but this sort of unforced error boggles my powers of empathy.
He is genuinely the worst president in American history and that includes James Buchanan and the ~15 presidents who owned slaves.
I'm not familiar enough with history to compare Trump to presidents from the comical-facial-hair era, but in his second term he's easily surpassed GWB as my "worst president of living memory."
As fucked up as Iraq/Afghanistan were, they were the result of normal thought processes and GWB was legitimately trying to make the world better. Trump is almost a Captain Planet villain: doing bad things for the sake of being nasty and accruing debt in research, alliances, trust, and bureaucracy that will take a generation to fix (if we're lucky).
I continue to think W was worse than Trump because he killed more people. Prioritizing vague ideas about epistemic hygiene over human life is dubious.
"he killed more people"
Through direct military action, yes, but there's probably a good argument that the cuts to USAID and PEPFAR will kill many more people on net.
Trump gets credit for operation warp speed & the CARES Act. He did not mess up a good economy before covid (Mnuchin & Powell were good appointments). However, he also destroyed PEPFAR, USAID, and hollowed out most departments and agencies, politicized gov't stats, encouraged Jan 6 and pardoned the perpetrators. His leadership during covid was erratic and dangerous despite warp spped and CARES. Bush invaded Iraq on false pretenses and launched a war on Afghanisttan with unclear and unachievable political objectives. He tried but failed to ruin social security. He also created PEPFAR and signed flawed but good legislation to provide pharmaceutical benefits through Medicaire. It's a close call. I say Trump is the worst President of my lifetime, and the war in Iraq was the single biggest blunder.
Fair but very difficult to adjudicate.
This very change could actually be something that enables many more deaths to happen than those under Bush. We aren't there yet - but in hindsight we'll know.
It's really astonishing how The Trump Administration seems do something (often times multiple) really bad basically every single day. If you're not glued to the news you can't even keep up with it!
Flooding the zone…
That is part of how they get away with a bunch of it. It becomes too much to counter, moves the overton window, and even when there is a counter-force, the lessor ills make it through.
Honestly, its like at every opportunity they choose the worst possible decision. Every freaking day.
I can't rank Trump behind James Buchanan, a man who literally defended the Dread Scott decision and did not think he could do anything to stop the American Civil War. I'd also probably rank Trump ahead of Andrew Johnson, the guy who completely fumbled Reconstruction. Part of this is due to the times: the time period Trump is President is simply not as dire for America as the 1850s and '60s were, but some of it is also Trump himself. OWS was a superb program which saved millions of lives. Trump deserves credit for it. Some of his diplomacy has been OK.
So only 3rd or 4th worst President, and the worst since WWII by a country mile.
In a wins above replacement framework I would slot Trump between Buchanan and Andrew Johnson. There were few politicians that could have fumbled the bag as bad as Buchanan by first inflaming Northern anti-slavery and sectional feeling and then just checking out during the secession crisis.
Andrew Johnson was very bad, but looking at the end of the Grant administration he feels closer to the replacement level for the era than Trump.
But we'll see, 3 1/2 years to go...
That’s a fair point. In a way, James Buchanan was probably as bad as most democratic options in ‘56. I suppose Johnson was the only choice for a ‘national union’ ticket in ‘64. But both were quite bad.
An interesting framework
Don't forget John Tyler who is the only President that was buried under a confederate flag and who was going to take a seat under their Congress. I rank Trump like the 3rd worst in that context after Tyler and Buchanan.
Yea…
Are you implying that if you'd grown up on and inherited a large plantation in 1820 you wouldn't have kept the slaves as slaves? You'd give up all the servants, start tending those fields yourself, etc.
That has no bearing on whether or not owning slaves a really bad thing to do. If I said “well, if you were living in the 1940s, would you beat your wife like most people did” that doesn’t change the fact that domestic abuse is immoral.
It greatly impact you feelings of judgement and moral superiority.
Is that supposed to be a gotcha? Yes I do feel morally superior to people who owned slaves or beat their wives because I do not do those things. I also feel morally superior to people who kick puppies and murderers.
You seem so sure you wouldn't have. An arranged marriage who someone was adept and mercilessly pushing your buttons. Everyone has their limit.
I bet you think you'd have Anne Frank hiding in your attic. You wouldn't.
The more interesting question is what thing that we/you do will future generations look back at as morally repugnant and feel morally superior to us? Eat meat? Kill fetuses?
I don't know, but there will be some, we're only very very temporarily the ones at history's apex.
I still rate Andrew Jackson as the worst, but I'll pass judgement in 2028.
He's the 1st and 2nd worst president in history. Trump 2 > Trump 1> Biden.
"...the steelman case for “Trump is not a cartoon villain.”.
Cartoonists would not stoop to such distorted caricatures of a human face?
The argument is generally that the institutions progressives care about -- the civil service and the federal bureaucracy, the tech/biotech sector, academia and the universities, and the cultural/arts spheres -- are so rotten to the core that Trump's wrecking ball approach is not only justified but in fact the only way to induce reform. Biden (i.e. cosmopolitan progressives) forced Americans to take the COVID vaccine, mocked their interest in ivermectin-like cures, and claimed that discussion of lab leak was racist. If Trump slows down cancer research for a few years, maybe progressives will learn their lesson and be more deferential next time. Besides, if the government was subsidizing anything of value then the private sector will immediately and completely seamlessly pick up the slack, so the risk of the wrecking ball is low.
That’s similar to what I would argue in Trump’s defense. The rebuttal is that America is uniquely prosperous and relatively stable and safe, so our institutions can’t be that bad.
One ongoing frustration I have wrt Trump: I think there are major problems with a lot of our institutions. I think the public health agencies mostly came out of covid looking pretty bad, universities have beclowned themselves to do performative politics at a level that has wrecked their credibility, scientific publications and societies have put out obvious nonsense for ideological reasons. I think federal agencies are often inefficient, foreign aid was often not being spent very well, the process by which research grants are/were handed out has all kinds of problems that both waste resources and wreck a lot of important things. All these are things I share with a lot of MAGA types.
And then, the MAGA types get in, and their solutions to these problems range from hamfisted to crazy. Making federal agencies more efficient and effective is a good thing to do, but you're not doing it in a few months as an outsider with a team of clever 25-year-olds and a tendency to tweet out edicts in the middle of the night. Foreign aid programs should be measured for effectiveness and cut if they don't make the grade, but that requires figuring out what your goals are and how to measure them--stuff that will take years of work to get right. Research funding is a mess, but fixing it means understanding what's going wrong and fixing it, not taking an axe to it or switching from having the funding allocated by woke commissars to having it allocated by MAGA commissars. US health agencies lost a lot of credibility from not performing all that well during covid, but you're not going to fix any of the problems that caused that by putting a nut in charge of HHS.
It's almost a replay of 2020, when I was happy to see everyone start taking police misconduct and no-knock warrants and civil forfeiture and police militarization and such seriously, and then the whole country took a left turn into obsessing over a boneheaded theory of race as the explanation for everything and never got around to doing much about the actual police misconduct or any of that stuff.
I 100% agree. I worked as a federal appellate staff attorney, and the amount of time and effort devoted to pedantry and avoiding typos was excessive. However, I would rather over invest in copy editing than destroy a reasonably functional judicial system that had done a reasonably effective job at avoiding judicial corruption, show trials and political prosecutions.
One issue is it’s very difficult to have an inclusive conversation about efficiency. Few people are good at tradeoffs between conscientiousness and speed, and very few people know enough about the workings of government to have sensible ideas. Civil service reform is inherently an elite project, and too many of our elites have been captured by an ideology that makes them unacceptable to the median voter.
I also think there's a lot that could be reformed in the US. But it seems like you think the only thing that really matters is "woke", which is exactly the meme-complex that got us Trump. I'm glad that you're not so far gone as to be unable to grasp how bad things are, but get that poison out of your head before it wrecks your ability to even see that.
No, I think dysfunction is bad. I think spending our foreign aid budget and research grant money badly is bad and that we should try to do it better. I think inefficient government operations are bad and we should try to do better. I wish the Trump administration was actually working to improve those things in some way that had some hope of bearing fruit.
Similarly, I think police corruption and abuse are bad, civil forfeiture is legalized robbery, and like 95% of uses of dynamic entry raids by the cops are taking crazy risks with the lives of normal citizens. I don't think everyone switching over to a grand Teaching Moment on Race instead of focusing on these issues actually solved many problems. Ahistorical think pieces about how policing was white supremacist weren't just dumb, they also spent the public interest on police reform in a way that never got around to solving many of the actual solvable problems.
As best I can tell, universities, prestigious media organs, and scientific societies beclowned themselves on behalf of woke ideas, not only because many people within those organizations believed in those ideas, but also because they mostly don't have any resistance to bad ideas and will follow whatever the powerful people are saying, or whatever their internal factional politics require. That's why the same universities who were all about social justice in 2020 are now bending the knee to Trump--they're the same spineless creatures they were in 2020, it's just that a different faction holds the whip hand now. Five years ago they were Kendi's men, a year ago they were Kamalas, and now they are Trump's. Whose will they be on the morrow?
I think it can simultaneously be true that the real issue was police abuse, that many of us cared deeply about this, that the right worked very hard to turn this into an issue of “woke” so that reform wouldn’t need to happen, and that the result is that we have a President determined to make the police totally unaccountable and turn them against the citizenry. This is not a very hard story to tell, because it happens to be the truth.
There were certainly people talking on Twitter about “woke” and Universities did some performative stuff. I’m just saying that when I look at the “woke” issue, what I see is one side doing powerful, obviously, immediately harmful and consequential things in the name of “fighting woke” and another side mostly just saying words that don’t have much impact on my life outside of social media. The fact that we’re in this mess is because people decided these threats were remotely of the same magnitude, and we’ll get out of it when people are able to balance threats more reasonably (if ever.)
> never got around to doing much about the actual police misconduct
There was one big improvement to come out of those efforts: ubiquitous body cams.
Yeah, I think the way this goes is I then cite a lot of polling showing trust in institutions has been on a steady decline with a particularly sharp drop after the pandemic, the increase in mental health issues and concerns especially in young generations, the "deaths of despair" and loneliness literature, etc.
Then you cite objective measurements showing that quality of life is actually going up, Americans are generally wealthier, crime is decreasing, people are buying more and larger homes, and have more in savings (especially during the pandemic).
At that point, if I'm particularly conspiratorial, I simply argue that your statistics have been "cooked up" and should not be trusted over lived/subjective experience (perhaps I even send you a twitter thread or a blog post with a DIY statistical analysis showing crime has been underreported or whatever).
If I'm less conspiratorial, I argue that lived experience is ultimately what matters, and that Trump explicitly ran on a platform of degrading the objective measurements (particularly those in blue states and those respected by progressives) in exchange for an improvement in subjective measurements (particularly those in red states and respected by conservatives) and ... well, he won twice (or maybe three times) so who is really the cartoon villain here?
Easy to improve “lived experience” (ugh that term) just get rid of Fox News and MAGA media
Pretty sure surveys show people on the left are more miserable than those on the right. In fact, it's discussed in the most liked post on this site.
Also, you were just saying a day or two ago that everything in the world is getting worse.
Everyone’s lived experience would improve if Republicans had no platform or political representation.
But yes, awareness tends to be a threat to happiness
And social media and short-form video while we're at it
My brother once brought up the idea of an internet data tax to combat doomscrolling and constant video streaming. It's a weird idea from the jump, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes: most people face incredible diminishing marginal returns with internet data usage.
The highest-value internet uses mostly don't require much data. I buy data-only SIM cards when travelling; high-value internet tasks like maps, translating, WhatsApp, and Uber usually total <1GB/day. People got along fine doing high-value internet tasks like emailing relatives, playing games, homework, and text news with dial-up modems topping out at ~25MB per hour (~600MB per day).
Low value internet use does often require a lot of data. TikTok uses close to 1GB per hour. Facebook uses about 500MB per hour. Netflix at 1080p takes about 3GB per hour.
Weird as it sounds, I think that taxing internet data would do a great deal to deter negative impacts from the internet.
(The average US household uses about 21 GB per day now. 50¢ per GB seems like a good rate to tax it.)
Is Fox New really even relevant anymore? It may be the most relevant legacy media but that's not saying much. Getting rid of the internet on the other hand...
To seniors, it is
There were plenty of mainstream voices who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was racist, but I think the USG under both Trump and Biden took it quite seriously. And honestly, by 2020, pretty much all mainstream media folks knew that accusing their opponents of being racist was this One Cool Trick for winning their arguments on the internet. They also said liking your favorite movie or book was racist and problematic. Because it got them clicks, and they'd sell their grandmother to the dogfood plant for clicks.
So if progressives would just stop being "rotten to the core," (does that include reporting the employment data accurately?) not "force" people to receive vaccines, be more respectful of their good faith doubts about the value of vaccines vis a vis home remedies and alternative hypotheses abut the origin of the next pandemic -- all good advice, of course -- we are out of the woods? Or will a whole new set of markers of Progressives be drawn up for demonization in order to retain political power?
There is probably some way to divorce the fringe health skeptics from MAGA. Remember it wasn't all to long ago this stuff was mostly leftwing coded. I don't have a clear plan - but while I don't think some solution here would convince current MAGA folk to vote D, it would be a worthwhile endeavor.
That's one of the most frustrating things. The intellectual right who know this is all bullshit and should be denouncing it are instead propogating conspiracy narratives because they're cynical libertarians with too much appetite for risk. I'm coming around to the idea that a populist left administration might be bad in the short term, but scaring these numskulls straight is more important for long-term stability.
If there is one norm I could cultivate among intellectuals, it would be an unwillingness to play along with bullshit from their own side, lie, shade the truth, or downplay evidence that is unfavorable to their side. There are people on the right who I think don't do that sort of thing (Razib Khan is an example), but most politically-engaged intellectuals very much have a side and are inclined to support their side even when their side has bad ideas or is claiming silly things.
The stuff with demonizing mRNA vaccines is just bizarre. I mean, there are real reasons you might worry about any kind of medical treatment, but as far as I can tell most people who are freaked out about mRNA vaccines don't know what mRNA is or what it does. It's a scary acronym associated with bad times during covid.
"if the government was subsidizing anything of value then the private sector will immediately and completely seamlessly pick up the slack"
So, we can count on the private sector to immediately pick up the slack on providing health care/hospitals in rural areas, money for retired and disabled people, agricultural subsidies, and natural disaster relief any day now? Good to know!
Or do you mean that if the government gets rid of these things and the private sector doesn't replace them, that means ipso facto they were not *of value*? Well then great, just get rid of them then, I'm sure nobody will notice!
I think the idea is the latter, that if the private sector doesn't step in then these investments were not worth making to begin with. Given that Trump did much better with rural and lower educated voters than Harris, and those are the voters most likely to be impacted by rural hospitals and healthcare, it would imply that they are willing to take some degradation to their objective quality of life in exchange for some improvement to their perceived quality of life.
“…improvement to their perceived quality of life” is a heck of a euphemism for “the enjoyment of seeing Trump make the libs cry.” What other “perceived improvement” could there possibly be? The booming rural economy brought about by Mr. Art of the Deal’s tariffs?
Well yes, JD Vance is promising two things: (1) your enemies in the ivory tower and the silicon valley cubicle and the green card lottery will suffer and (2) because this is a zero-sum world, that necessarily means you will benefit.
From what I've heard about herd mentality verging into cultism, folks don't wake up until there are body bags on the front porch... something like that. Even so, you'd think the amount of conservatives who died from Covid would elicit a more measured reaction than supporting RFK.
We've decided as a society that discussing excess Covid deaths is cringe for some reason.
That's what a societal decline in conscientiousness looks like.
Eh, that seems to be pretty much the historical norm for pandemics. As was discussed during COVID, the Spanish Flu pandemic pretty rapidly vanished from public consciousness once it was over, as did many other previous pandemics/epidemics. (Tangentially related, Matt wrote about the 1889 "Russian Flu" here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/covid-1889 )
Not just cringe, but even the "smart rationalists" Matt has fallen in with feel that it's a big debate.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-evidence-that-a-million-americans
I don't feel like that's a fair characterization of the argument in that post. Rationalists were generally ahead of the curve in anticipation of covid and execution of appropriate mitigations. But there's a certain very loud and unrepresentative minority* of MAHA-ish cranks that orbit the rationalist sphere (as any space dedicated to not pre-excluding heretics inevitably attracts heretics), and occasionally Scott charitably tries to address those concerns. Which leads to somewhat-silly-seeming posts defending Really Obvious Things that Everybody Knows, but that's what it means to actually address a crank argument seriously rather than the usual social-shaming tone-policing type rhetorical dismissals. Like, this is the guy who infamously spent heroic amounts of effort and social capital wading through the ivermectin literature to see if there was something, anything at all to salvage from that swamp of epistemic bullshit. The excess covid deaths post is similar, walking through the common crank claims of Why You Shouldn't Trust The Official Statistics and...finding there's just not much there, there. Crucially though, it still ends with an open invitation to Prove Me Wrong, rather than a wholesale dismissal of the line of inquiry as Settled Science. I.e. the opposite of declaring the opposition wrongly cringe for even bringing the topic up.
*Like the SB commentariat, ACX's peanut gallery has drifted rightward over the years, due to shifting selection effects for who bothers to comment. Community surveys continue to show the actual readership as a whole still skews towards bland anodyne liberal squish though.
I think the MAHA cranks used to orbit the place. Then they (and some alt-right folks) settled into the comment section and drove a lot of the really smart people away while giving themselves a huge platform (since the open-minded blogger *has* to take their concerns seriously.) And now it's a place that has to run periodic posts reminding the commentariat that actually, a deadly virus killed a lot of people. And that description is the best case. The worst is that the same contagious reasoning incapacity that created the MAHA folks has already claimed more victims from among the relatively inexperienced autism-spectrum people who participate in that community.
We live in a time where conspiracy theories are overcoming rational thinking, with grave implications for our national survival. One might hope that a "rationalist" community might offer us successful strategies to fight this. The actual evidence indicates that they've been even more successfully-colonized by those conspiracy theories than, say, the average Crossfit.
I don't know - did you read the recent Not-A-Book-Review of the ACX commentariat, which tried to analyze this (perception of) declining comment quality? Happy to fully grant that there's been a bit more of a Just Answering Just Asking Questions(tm) vibe versus historically, which doesn't necessarily show up qualitatively, and autists are really bad at underestimating the value of outsider perceptions. In an era of a broader worldwide right turn, one will necessarily encounter more right perspectives more freely, and counter-content aimed at same. Contrast to the heyday of SSC, where many of the Greatest Hits are explicitly hatchet jobs against SJWs and wokeism, yet the commentariat was simultaneously more lefty. Different waters to swim in for different times. For MAHA in particular, it's also somewhat an artefact of party realignment along the crankery axis - as MattY has written about, health nut conspiracism used to be more bipartisan, or even strongly left-coded in certain subgenres. But the consolidation of crankery under the right wing artificially serves to inflate their seeming numbers and influence, even if in absolute terms it's still quite fringe. When left nuts aren't sparring with right nuts along non-nut-based lines, all that's left is the nuttery.
But it genuinely does seeem important to not make a base rate fallacy here, where going from 2% crankery to 4% is indeed "doubling", yet it's still 96% not-cranks. The place absolutely has not been cranked to 11. And periodic explicit defenses of Consensus Reality would seem to cut both ways with the "inexperienced" newcomers, no? Good ideas and their defenders need to periodically survive such trials-by-fire, else we all slip into the complacency of the learned. That literally is one of the key strategies on offer, to engage seriously and charitably with one's critics rather than dismiss them on unrelated "working the refs" cultural grounds or appeals to authorities they don't trust to begin with. There's a reason that, to the extent "right-wing intellectual" is not an OxiClean(tm) moron these days, an oddly high number of them still overlap with the rationalists.
My husband worked Covid icu in a hospital that would get severe cases helicoptered in from MAGA cesspools like Idaho and eastern WA. The number of people who denied that covid was real and claimed it was a hoax while demanding ivermectin/hydroxychloroquine and threatening lawsuits right before having to be put on ventilators and then dying was quite striking. They denied Covid to the end. It’s pretty offensive that we wasted so many resources on people that didn’t deserve it.
"MAGA cesspools like Idaho..."
Your overall point is well-taken, but on behalf of SB star contributor and Boise resident City of Trees, I must object to describing Idaho as just a "MAGA cesspool." There are good people there too.
There are MAGA cesspools and good people in all 50 states. The proportion just varies a bit across the country.
Sure. But I doubt he’d disagree. Boise is a little blue dot in a sea of deep red
I don't understand why these people even went to the hospital. If they think the real treatment is ivermectin, why go to a hospital where that won't be administered?
Yep. Germans had to see their cities in flames before Hitler's popularity waned. It's tough to talk people out of their loyalty to what, for all intents and purposes, is a cult.
Even then, his support hovered around the 30s-40s, according to polling done after the war. It took generational turnover for Germany to truly turn its back on Nazism.
Bring back the Herman Cain Award?
But then we're blamed for being elitist and condescending.
TBF, the Herman Cain award *was* elitist and condescending, and kind of cruel, too. Also not helpful at all.
RFK represents MAGA's version of one of "the groups." Getting RFK on board was politically necessary for Trump (and probably helped him a lot with the Joe Rogan types), but the cost is that he got put in charge of HHS. And this then leads to some really bad policies in an area where Trump was previously relatively good. Sabotaging US public health policy and medical research funding in order to get and keep power is bad, but it seems like the normal kind of politician badness, rather than some uniquely Trumpian badness.
Since Trump can't run again (in principle....), it seems like there was no reason not to jettison RFK on day 1. What were the Joe Rogan types gonna do? Take back their vote? Vote for Democrats in the mid terms?
This isn't an indeterminate-length game where Trump needs to carefully manage the mutual obligations of feudal incidents - he can just defect now for free. He just says what is and the Republicans fall in line like the spineless worms they are.
"spineless worms" might imply there exist spineful worms. But of course there are no worms with spines. One might even say the defining feature of worms is that they are spineless.
Polychaetes have spines! Although admittedly not in the intended sense of "vertebrae."
I half agree. Compare Trump’s treatment of evangelical Christians. He needs them too, but was perfectly willing to draw lines against them on abortion, which has been their core issue for 50 years.
He could have taken the votes of Rogan cranks and then pandered to the 80+% of the electorate who like vaccines. This sort of thing and the BLS firing can’t be very attractive to chamber of commerce types or even Mormons.
There are better ways for Trump to pander to the manosphere. Crapping on liberal ideas about sexuality and dating seems a lot more electorally viable than crapping on life saving vaccines.
I’m convinced that half of the current dating discourse is driven by Russian and Chinese bots at this point. Our decline is in their interest
Is that how CHH is building a brand dunking on “someone said something stupid on the internet”
You know it. For the record I don’t think that she and Lirpa and Kryptogal (who are kind of the substack dating discourse hydra) are bots. Of course not. But a fair amount of the bullshit on Twatter/Facebook/reddit that starts the divisive shit that others run with and trickles up to them probably is.
Scott Alexander's excellent post "The Toxoplasma of Rage" captures a lot of what's going on there. Getting people upset is very good for keeping them watching.
Lirpa? https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Lirpa
is lorna worth checking out? Kryptogal seems sharper than CHH, who is just slightly officious and a bit too idealistic for my tastes.
Yeah, nah. One of the biggest mistakes Matt has made is assuming evangelicals recognized the strategic calculus and voluntarily moderated on abortion. I know a lot of evangelicals, that's not what happened. Republicans have a lot more control over their media ecosystem and can pick and choose who receives which message.
I’m not sure it’s normal badness to just cancel major programs like this vaccine research program. This seems like the special Trump badness that he empowered Musk to do a lot of as well.
Are there any big programs that got the plug pulled in the middle of a funding year before?
Yeah, wanting to cure cancer was once just about the most bipartisan idea out there, along with "don't murder puppies" and "ice cream tastes good."
It's not like anyone thinks curing cancer is bad, but Republicans have successfully convinced a large segment of the electorate that Democrats are evil and therefore any seemingly good thing they do is a facade for something more nefarious. I Socratically interrogated a Republican friend and this is where the conversation ended up. He did not believe there were any Democratic politicians who wanted what's best for the country. They were all corrupt. What's bizarre is that he gets along better with his brother and I, both of whom are liberals, than he does with the conservative side of his family who have become somewhat estranged.
I had a friend like this, I eventually came to realize his worldview came from the perspective that if he (or his family) were in the position to abuse their power, they would. And therefore, he assumed anyone else would as well.
I kind of wonder if this is the mental framework you have to adopt to protect yourself once you've gone all-in on one of the most self-serving conmen out there.
Have you met our Homeland Security Secretary? We may be down to just ice cream, but I’m not sure where MAHA stands on anything other than vanilla.
I suppose appointing a clown to an important federal office to placate part of your faction is normal politician badness. But ideally you'd also know he was a clown and keep him on a short leash.
I don't know how common it is to see programs like this cancelled. The reasons for cancelling it seem pretty dumb as I understand things, but I'm not sure whether this is unprecedented or not.
Disagree, this is very much Trumpian badness, in the sense that Trump represents maximal polarization and will embrace literally anything that goes against the values of Biden/Democrats. I’m sure he is fine with attacking cancer research, considering how keen Biden was on promoting it.
My mental model is that identity politics is a lot stronger than people admit to. Especially Democrats. Largely because they ignore that "not a Democrat/Liberal" is by far the strongest identity out there.
This is most evident in polling that shows how unpopular Democrats are. And if you ever talk to someone in a MAGA circle, they have far more distrust of Democrats than they do trust in anything else.
Major reason why I don't think Matt's moderation prescription is going to work. Anti-Democrat has become a core identity trait for a lot of voters. The conservative ecosystem is gonna negatively polarize themselves against anything Democrats do and drag compulsively middle ground voters along with them. Trying to rewind the clock and chasing old perceptions isn't viable. There's no way out but through.
One of the biggest upsides of a proportional-voting system for congress would be jettisoning many of the crazier Democrats into third parties.
These trends seem to be playing out across most Western nations regardless of how they apportion representatives.
I don't disagree, I don't think. But what are you actually proposing?
Go left until business libertarians have the fear of God put into them and internalize the dangers of populism.
I confess this brings a dark smile to me. I don't know that I agree it is a good direction to go. Seen far too many absurd ideas from the left to get excited about it being a legit tactic.
The economic absurdity is the point. They want to sow the seeds of populism, let them reap the rewards.
Perhaps we should start a rumor that the President was a registered Democrat from August 2001 until September 2009?
Oddly, I think this is a big part of the myth that is currently there. The idea is he saw corruption from the inside and took a stand...
Democrats are unpopular because they don't have a popular party head that's delivering on things people like. That'll change, and I doubt it'll even be long.
I don't know that I agree. Democrats are unpopular because Fox News was far more effective than people realized.
To get even more depressing on it, they took a scorch the earth approach. They largely focused on not trusting Democrats. But they also built up a ton of "you can't trust any government" such that they primed the pump to distrust any criticism of them. Is why they have trouble getting new leadership even in their own ranks. If you go against the line, you are immediately an outsider and they already distrust anyone that is not in the in.
Democrats are unpopular across the country right now only because they’re unpopular among Democrats are unpopular with Democrats. They’re unpopular in Missouri and Ohio because of the thing you said, but the GOP is unpopular loads of other places for the same reason.
I think this is a part of where people don't contend with just how effective Fox News was. They scorched the earth for trust in Democrats and trust in Government.
That is, I began my assertion with "not Democrat" being a big identity that they built. But "don't trust the government" is a sibling identity there, as well. Worse, it is one that many others rode the coattails on to build their audience within what would be Democratic bases, as well.
The key to my assertion is that in the places where the GOP is unpopular, it isn't like the Democrats are popular. Instead, the general scene is where the GOP is unpopular, trust in the government is similarly low.
The Dems have been popular in recent memory, and they’ve even won some elections by substantial amounts, ie the polls that matter. Right now they’re at a historical low because the left wants them to punch the GOP very hard and they haven’t been. That will change.
"it’s hard to understand how 44% of the country supports him"
It's easier to understand if you realize that people are often not that rational, especially about things that are abstractions to them and not within their immediate purview.
Negative partisanship is a helluva drug
A lot of his voters can’t stand him but for whatever reasons (that I think are misguided, but they think are legitimate) preferred him to the Democrats. Which is why Fox News has to be drowned in the bathtub because their whole MO is nutpicking Democrats. We’re not going to get a world where there are no nuts - there are 330m people in the US - so things won’t change for the better until the alternative media ecosystem is quashed.
There isn't one. As Jeff Tiedrich said on his Substack, "Trump is what would happen if the Seven Deadly Sins became a real boy."
The American people demanded the end of modernity. It would be at least as terrifying if they didn’t get it.
Simple. He's doing what he promised his voters he would do and they don't mind that he is playing roughshod with governmental and Constitutional norms.
You also have to think of the incrementalism. You don't usurp a democratic government in six months unless you are a certain Austrian with a toothbrush moustache. You gut the agencies that don't affect people and impose military policy where your ability to do so is disputed rather than illegal. Besides, why give up on democracy when it gives you the power you want? You do that when it stops being beneficial (Taiwan in reverse).
"Own the Libs" as policy is not good, but it is popular with a portion of the nation.
Negative partisanship is a hell of a drug....
people are bad at this, and they are happy to idiots. people all over the world are amazing at living with cognitive dissonance - and after getting online and seeing all kinds of things we retreated back to our priors apparently.
https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/
"blue" people have their own huge blindspots, and "the groups" are especially guilty of this, for example when it comes to immigration and border security, they pushed things too far and it was enough for the the voters (egged on by the usual hate machines) to elect a rapist felon .... paved with good intentions after all.
and of course who's to say that those activists (and whoever had how much of influence) are wrong? (after all maybe the loose border and now the deportations, and long months of cruel ICE incarceration are still "better" than discouraging people from even trying, or funding various strange programs all over Central and South America to keep people from moving toward the border)
if the only moral activism is my activism, then what's really left? number go up? GDP good?
(well, the obvious answer is that exactly this is why Hari Seldon will develop the effective altruist formula, duh)
Fuck off with this "pushed too far" bullshit. It's such an empirically dead, vibes-coded way to frame things that gives reactionaries way more credit than they deserve. It's like stock watchers insisting every drop/rise begets a correction. No, current sentiments are always baked into the existing price. Just because prevailing cultural sentiments abruptly jolt one way doesn't necessarily mean a correction is coming.
I agree that it's giving them more credit than they deserve, but this is still how things are. Empirically the US is under-policed, over-intermediated, under-consolidated, over-extended, and ... on top of all that our dear median voter is easily persuaded by scare tactics from the various mainstream hate machines and eventually converts to the faith of infinite individualism with conformist characteristics.
Plus the Groups overplayed their hand for short-term results against the union of Christian settlers and slavers, and ... lost.
Again, data-wise where are those 6 million of voters? (2020 Biden 81M versus 2024 Kamala 75M) It's not just a blip.
The simple answer is that they get all their news from sources that won't tell them stuff like this. We've gone past Fox News -- when I've been in bars or hotels in red places, what you now see on the TVs is OAN or NewsMax, which if you know anything about the real world, read as some kind of grotesque self-parody, and yet they're taken as gospel.
If you try to explain this policy to them, they may insist that you're wrong; or that he's not the one responsible, it's actually the Deep State sabotaging him; or maybe that RFK is actually right and all of modern medicine is bad. The possibility of Dear Leader doing bad stuff is excluded, all evidence to the contrary is rejected.
“His political movement leaves thousand-dollar bills on the ground out of quasi-religious partisan motivation” should basically be the easiest thing about the Trump movement for us to understand.
We only need the 7%
Sometimes things are as they seem
Just so awful. And extremely dumb from an America-first / national defense perspective as well, not to mention losing out on biotech/pharma to increasingly stiff competition from China.
The point to remember about "America First"-ism is that these people have a different definition of "America" than you or I do. To them, "America" isn't our de jure institutions and citizenry. Only some de jure Americans count as "Real Americans", to borrow Sarah Palin's terminology. So their goal isn't to advance the United States' interests against China and other hostile countries. It's to advance the Real American Remnant's interests against Fake America (and China and other countries).
I wonder what JD Vance's definition of Real American is. Asking on behalf of his wife, children, and in-laws.
I'm 100% serious that someone should ask Vance if his children are "Heritage Americans."
Real talk he will pretend to suddenly get really indignant that someone had the audacity to bring up his family and derail the question. How dare you etc. And Fox News will unironically air a hundred segments with experts telling us how barbaric and mean spirited Newsom is. Completely predictable.
And 40% of America with slop for brains will lap it up. We're cooked.
I don’t think he would articulate it, but I suspect his instinct is that mothers don’t need to be counted in the calculus. Because of him his kids are, their mother’s role is akin to captured concubine or foreign born queen whose job is to provide heirs.
All that with a dash of shallow intellectual rigor and hypocrisy.
This is offensive and has no basis in anything he said.
He would absolutely pivot and claim the left is attacking him and just start gish galloping into oblivion. He will then claim that is is reverse racism or something to be asking about his family. He doesn't say much in good faith.
Because she married JD, she and the children have been designated Honorary Americans.
Yeah, interesting question.
I don't think they all agree on the precise definition. Sometimes it's 100% racial, sometimes it isn't. Some of them don't even have a definition of who a Real American is, they only know who isn't one.
My guess is he would believe they are because they are Christian, related to JD (have some claim to his 'Real American' genetics) and have 'Real American Values' (i.e. agree with JD) then they are indeed "Real Americans". There was a recent Ezra Klein podcast on this where he played a clip of Josh Hawley saying something like "People accuse me of being a Christian nationalist...and I am"
I think JD is more racially obsessed than Hawley though. I can't see Hawley finding issue with immigrants who assimilated to Christian American culture. JD on the other hand has said plainly he thinks the longer you live here, the more American points you have
I think JD has indicated it's pretty racial. I mean he's on tape staying people who were here the longest are the most American. He's also written about how America isn't based on shared values at all, so if you can't adopt American values to become American, you're on the outside looking in.
I do wonder what he actually thinks though. His wife seems like an intelligent person who would likely be disgusted by this, but maybe she's one of those weirdos who don't think women should be able to vote. Or maybe it's all a ruse for him to get power, and then he pivots when he's president?
If it's the latter I think it's extremely stupid to think you can put that genie back in the bottle.
Exactly this...
They are more concerned about who isn't part of their in group that they can attack than anything else. They probably consider themselves and people who support their version of white christian nationalism to be considered real Americans and everyone else just isn't. Unless they get honorarily adopted into that tribe.
vague umbrella term that Dear Leader uses and I assume covers me is good, anyone else is just a freeloader in this zero-sum world.
This is why the future still looks bright even if bumpy. MAGAs are tremendously powerful now because they control the American political system but they don’t have the numbers to dominate the whole world forever. They are essentially a declining aristocracy, and declining aristocracies have two choices: take in fresh blood like the WASPs in America did or lose power. They can’t avoid this choice and liberals should accelerate things where they can by not cooperating with them.
Yes, it paralels people on the left who are more focused on fighting DINOs and "the establishment" than making incremental improvements.
Hey, as long as those people with degrees are miserable, who cares about turning into a third world country?
Plus, the economy is fake anyway and leveraged on unsustainable debt, so being poorer is better.
Or so the argument goes, anyway.
This is obviously speculation combined with schadenfreude-motivated reasoning, but I imagine that in, say, 20 years going to the US from most places will require a regime of prophylactic vaccinations to protect from endemic diseases that are currently basically eradicated: measles, definitely, and, at a stretch, polio.
Anti-vax is the red line I just can't cross on the right. A lot of other issues I can squint and say "ok I see where you're getting this even if I disagree with your conclusion," but with vaccines, no. The second somebody even flirts with anti-vax stuff, I immediately question all their other positions.
Vaccines are just about the closest thing we get in the real to something unambiguously good. Being against vaccines are like being against flush toilets. The fact some people have decided that this is the thing to dedicate their lives to defeat is so depressing.
Yeah. I don't even have anything more insightful to say. It's just sad.
I don't have much to add here because I agree with everything both of you have said, but seeing a back and forth between "Just Some Guy" and "GuyInPlace" is pretty funny.
The way people talk about "freedom" these days, I feel like some people think it's their god-given right to take a piss wherever they please. I think the flush toilet analogy seems apt.
No, I get why they are so adamantly opposed to vaccines. They are strong, manly, tough men who never back down from a fight but there is a line and that line is apparently the ouchie that you feel when that small needle goes into your arm.
I'm all for dunking on anti-vaxxers, but is there even a gender skew?
Yeah, isn't it mostly the moms who don't want their precious babies to be autistic (or protected from easily-preventable diseases)?
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/05/16/what-americans-think-about-the-mmr-vaccines/
Yeah just looked it up, women are SLIGHTLY more anti-vax than men.
It might be part of an overall tendency for women to be more skeptical of new technology. They're more anti-nuclear power as well.
Unfortunately, on-line search results for vaccine hesitancy studies are utterly swamped by post-COVID studies, but I'd be curious as to whether prior to COVID-19 the gender gap was greater and men have negatively polarized into becoming increasingly anti-vax.
Here is the one teeny-tiny point I will concede. I look at the vaccination schedule for my little granddaughters, and it is really startling how many vaccinations kids get now. My own (handwritten!) vax records from the 1960s show measles, rubella, polio, smallpox, TDAP, and maybe a couple of others. So of course that seems the correct amount to me. Since I'm not rock-stupid, I recognize that more vaccines have been developed and if the doctors agree that it's good for the kids to get more vaccines, then okay, that's the way we should go. But it does still FEEL like a lot.
Well the 5 shots you got before were all that was available. Now it is around 14 diseases or so I believe. So your gut feeling is correct.
More Info here:
https://www.whattoexpect.com/first-year/health/how-many-vaccines-do-children-get
https://ysph.yale.edu/public-health-research-and-practice/information-sheets/childhood-vaccinations/
Part of the changes are due to a longer schedule for better lifelong efficacy. And the other parts are simply that they are giving vaccines against more preventable diseases.
But you bring up a great point, instead of immediately getting upset and scared that things changed from when you were a kid you realized that more vaccines have been developed and probably asked your daughter or the pediatrician. Most people now start searching and their social media algorithm plays into that fear and starts feeding them false information from influencers. As someone who works in the healthcare industry specifically rare and novel disease, you'd be surprised how much people change their mind about what is a lot when their life is on the line.
I definitely think the moms are one of the roots of the conspiracy. I had an otherwise intelligent cousin who was convinced that vaccinations had caused autism in her child. You've got the parental instinct to protect children combined with the confusion, impotence and denial that comes when we realize that modern science doesn't have all the answers.
Then of course these deeply rooted impulses get exploited. In a way, RFK himself is being exploited (I can imagine the rest of the Regime snickering behind his back: "he actually believes all his nonsense!"
Or that their body is a temple that cannot be defiled - except by alcohol and "natural" supplements from GNC.
It's essentially the trolley problem. Take the covid vaccine as perhaps the clearest example. For a young person, taking the vaccine has a small, but observable chance of causing myocarditis; taking the vaccine reduces the already low chance of having a severe or fatal covid infection. For most vaccines, the potential risks are unproven-imaginary works too-but the tradeoffs are the same. Take a deliberate action to reduce one risk, and you'll just have to live with it if your action causes some other harm.
I spent last night at a bar with a friend of mine who is very much a Trad Catholic. He's good natured so while we agree on almost nothing about politics we spend a good amount of time on it. Nothing at the level of specifics like this seems to matter. It's all vibes, and those vibes are still very much centered on trans issues and "medical freedom" issues like vaccination schedules (although his specific objections were not around efficacy and autism but the use of cell lines derived from fetal tissue in development, which fair enough for a Catholic).
It really underscored for me how I don't think there will be a breakthrough in our current political moment until or unless something or many things get really bad in ways that are undeniable and discrediting to the MAGA movement. Unfortunately given the degree to which they are completely unwilling to attribute legitimate criticism against Trump it will have to be really bad at least while Trump is in power. There's not much evidence among the MAGAs in my life that their loyalty extends in the same way to anyone other than Trump, so there's also a chance that the movement kind of disintegrates after Trump is off the stage, but I wouldn't count on that being a certainty.
Also reminder that Monday 9/15 is a SLOW BORING AND STEADY HABITS HAPPY HOUR AT BAR IN NEW HAVEN! 6PM. It is happening at the same time as YIMBY Town 2025 and a brand spanking new YIMBY Action chapter (YIMBY South Central CT) founded by yours truly and some friends will also be around and looking to engage.
Slow Boring & Steady Habits
Date: Sep 15 • 6:00 pm
Location: 254 Crown Street, New Haven, CT 06511
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/slow-boring-steady-habits-tickets-1404469479019?aff=ebdsshother&utm_share_source=listing_android&sg=6cb9fdea91b97d51c8b538d40bd325c3dd3d06cccee2f5889ce22b1c5be19e09f0aea291a6f03eecb88b35444240293ab66b630330dd4e5fc9bbcb65ea9c55e24b2b38415dc0c8e745cc92e899
I would even call this current schizophrenia afflicting the nation an indulgence born of complacency ---its a luxury to be able to be so petty and obsessive, and I mean that about both far left liberals and Trumpers. That's the value of a depression economy, something we really haven't had for 90 years---it flushes the crap out and makes people feel the flames of bleakness enough to stop acting like imbeciles. (But even then if we end up there I don't know if it would merely reinforce authoritarianism...empires don't last forever).
nah, depression economy just breeds more idiots who vote for extremely dumb but fancy promises
Yeah, it's not like Hitler took over Germany during a time of prosperity.
Nothing lasts forever but we did get some pretty good breathing room from complete idiocy in the post 1930s to 1970s... arguably even through to 2000.
And then those same people get upset when politicians can't deliver on those fancy promises, which then breeds resentment and a whole generation of apathetic people or people who all think the system just needs to burn to the ground. Populism is frankly a cancer sometimes, and the fact that people gravitate towards those that give simple answers to complex problems.
Yep that's how we got FDR
is that good or bad? (or was that good or bad? I know Matt has a piece on FDR, and how he was not rocking the boat against the racists to keep them in the coalition, if I recall correctly)
I maintain FDR was bad. He put in place a whole lot of constitutionally dubious stuff (for example, the federal government getting to regulate the amount of wheat you grew on your own land even if you were using it only on your own land).
And his policies almost certainly made the great depression last longer.
"...Also reminder that...."
On my cell phone, this part of your comment was buried below the fold. You might want to re-post the news about the get-together as a separate post so that it is more visible on cell phones.
You mean my comment isn't inspiring enough to guarantee people are going to expand it? Unbelievable. Humiliating
"Unbelievable. Humiliating"
As well as, "profoundly unjust," and "a searing indictment of our culture's failure to read to the end of comments."
“Medical freedom” is such a weird line for them to use, because most of what they’ve done is actually to start to take away medical freedom! They haven’t given anyone a right to not get vaccinated who was being mandated in the past, but they’ve started taking away people’s rights to get vaccinated or to get gender hormones or to eat red #3 or whatever.
"although his specific objections were not around efficacy and autism but the use of cell lines derived from fetal tissue in development, which fair enough for a Catholic"
Do you think that if this issue were rendered moot by technological advances, he'd drop his objection?
It's worth mentioning that the Vatican, while objecting to the particular method of vaccine development, has said it is acceptable for Catholics to get the vaccine.
Sure, but what I'm getting at is that it's not impossible that this is just a more palatable excuse (being incontestably "faith-based"), and he'd find another one if it no longer was an issue.
But I don't know Casey's friend! I'm just reading the interaction in light of the wider comment, which sort of implied that the friend's excuse was cover for a more generalized willingness to go with the MAGA flow.
Absolutely and I don't want to be too hard on my coreligionists, being a practicing Catholic myself. I just also have low patience for this sort of thing, that being the pointing to the religious doctrine to justify something it doesn't actually require. Own your crankery dammit.
This is, I think, partially due to the post-religious nature of the US; "religion" is becoming detatched from dogma or catetchism. It's a much more pronounced phenomenon among evangelicals, but I think there's a not insubstantial "trad Catholic" bloc that is all about the vibes and half-understood doctrine (incidentally, I haven't kept up with it much recently - I thought trad Catholics were really going to have their day in the second Trump administration but they seem to be still sort of on the margins, or at least that's the impression I have, e.g. JD Vance only occasionally makes Catholic-ish public statements).
I don't think this sort of thing is exclusive to religion - any belief system, religious or secular, lends itself to motivated reasoning. But religion provides an especially effective structure for bolting on religious-y sounding motivations for what are effectively secular culture war issues.
I subscribe to everything my fellow Papist InMD gave in his response, and would add that part of the Trad Catholics not quite having their day in T2 is that they are not fully independently organized outside the traditional hierarchy, and that hierarchy is really unhappy about a lot of the Trump stuff.
The hierarchy view of cuts to poor people, foreign aid, health care etc. are diametrically opposed, and they are institutionally coherent enough to not bend. My contact inside the tent reports the trad Catholics are having a hard time reconciling their “yay Trump” priors with “whoah, that’s not what we meant “
Yea, I agree that religion is a particularly convenient justification for backing into positions one already supports or is sympathetic to for non spiritual reasons.
I'm not surprised the small Catholic vibe-ocracy attached to Trump hasn't been particularly influential. If salvation is actually what someone is looking for they aren't going to find it in partisan politics, which is an inherently worldly endeavor. Which isn't to say there aren't times where religious influence on leaders isn't an important and beneficial thing, and one that can be quite underrated. However I think people like Vance are a lot more likely to make religion political (and for that matter shallow) than they are to make politics religious. Trump will never compromise for values he doesn't hold, but he will absolutely expect his lieutenants to compromise their values for him.
"... Own your crankery dammit...."
Maybe you and I are coreligionists after all....
Exactly! Own the crank, don't use the religion shield to get out of things you just don't want to do. Using a faith based excuse should be disqualifying if it just flies in the face of facts and logic. But that is the good thing about faith based people, they can have unreasonable takes and you can't criticize them because they get to hid behind their interpretation of religion...
I asked that question specifically and he said yes. Also, he articulated the Church's position on utilizing treatments that involved "unethical" components in their development (namely, the harm being mitigated by the treatment must be sufficiently serious and there must be no other effective options) so to that end his kids all have the standard set of serious vaccines (MMR, hepatitis) while he's much more hesitant on things like chickenpox, COVID, and HPV (which he is against for additional reasons, you can probably guess).
Ugh, HPV. "Let's innoculate girls against a preventable disease that can cause cancer as a secondary effect!" "No, because then they'll have pre-martial sex." "Huh?" "No, YOUR'E a pedophile!"
Seems unfair to ask young women to potentially die for our country without even getting to have pre-martial sex.
I learned after one or two attempts that “OK, let’s assume your daughter is a virgin until marriage, can you be as sure about her husband never being exposed?”was not a winning argument.
It's sad that the new Catholics have so little concern for the Vatican. Here you have an org that, while flawed, can maintain some modicum of sanity. It's basically the only org preventing my parents from going totally conspiratorial.
Even a generation out, we probably haven't fully digested how much wider social damage the abuse scandal wrought.
"...he'd drop his objection?"
And did he mention how he refused to vote for Trump in 2024 because Trump promised to make IVF treatments available under insurance, when IVF treatments have as a predictable side effect the destruction of lots of embryos?
Maga will never admit that they have failed or they’ve done anything wrong. No matter how bad it gets. They will find a new leader and call for the second coming of Trump.
Here MAGA is objecting to a great success of Trump that saved hundred of thousands of lives.
“…objecting to a great success of Trump …”
They will never admit that it was Trump. They blame Biden and blue state governors.
The best thing that could've happened is for Trump to have died when he had COVID. Even then, though, I imagine the conspiracy mongers would've concocted a story of the elites intentionally killing him by denying him ivermectin.
Democrats need to start requiring in person voting and identification.
In person voting sucks... Nothing wrong with voter id cards though. Everyone should have ID.
There are trade offs between ease for certain voters v ballot secrecy.
Given that I still receive ballot at my house from residents who lived there 5 years ago it’s clear that it’s easier for those who have bothered to update their address.
Have you notified your election office?
Many many times. They tell me the process but unfortunately the mail system keeps on returning the ballot to me even though it’s written clearly they do not live at this address. I suspect in another decade I’ll still get those ballots.
ID yes, in person seems unnecessary. We've had mail in since like the civil war. If you want more civil engagement, you either need to provide free and easy voter ID's to everyone and make all election days holidays, with mandatory early voting options or simple make voting mandatory.
Mail in voting makes it easier at the expense of secret ballot and ensuring that voters aren’t unduly influenced. I vote via mail, at the same time as my wife, and we talk about it while we vote. I don’t see mail in voting to lend itself to free elections.
Also, whoa, Freddie is a "maybe"?
Haha, if you pull up the SB Post from 6/6 and dig deep enough you'll see that he and I had a...spirited engagement. Here's hoping he shows!
That was an all time amazing exchange on this site.
Matt should go if Freddie says he’s coming. They could livestream from BAR.
I mean, I'm hoping he won't, but only because then New Haven will be leveled in the world's first matter/anti-matter explosion.
Wow, he rarely engages in back-and-forth; he's more of a drive-by commenter kind of guy.
LOL - from the comments looks like a lot of us in our bubbles envy having someone with other ideas to talk to. The best I can manage to do is engage atheists once in awhile.
Does your friend ever give you details or just objections? Because to my knowledge there are no vaccines given out that contain fetal cells or tissues. So he is antivax because the technology was originally developed in a way that was morally wrong? I feel like he just likes being morally superior. There is a ton of technology we all benefit from that started due to WW2 or experiments on human beings. Also they are winning on "trans issues", so I'm not sure what more he'd want there. Did your friend not vote Republican before Trump? Like what other "medical freedom" issues does he have? Or is his issue that he can't dictate what other people do from a medical standpoint based on his beliefs? Because to my knowledge, we have a fair amount of medical freedom here in America.
I think you are right though, I think this is our current political climate for a while, until their movement may possibly get discredited. Even then though I think it'll be tough since they as a core belief never take accountability for anything and simply will never blame Trump for anything. I think as a character trait they simply believe they and those in their group are right and others are wrong.
The MAGA/MAHA turn against basically anything recommended by a medical professional makes me think that one genre of commentry that is both essentially correct and that I'm incredibly sick of is "the turn against institutions and expertise, along with all of the collateral damage that goes with that, is unfortunate but is ultimately the fault of all those pointy-head radicals in academia and journalism who mortgaged their legitimacy to pursue shiny social justice objects."
It is an accurate, albeit simplified and selective, account, but what I find insufferable is that it's just the rhetorical equivalent of "if anyone isn't free, we're all unfree." Most of the prescriptions for getting from point A to point B, or at least the ones that pundits and Substack commenters (including me, at times) make, are just slight variations of "be better." Like, okay...we'll get right on that, let you know when we're done.
I think people may be discounting how much idiots and crazy people being able to talk to each other and share videos is the biggest driver of this phenomenon. The SJW stuff was just the irritant that finally triggered the autoimmune response (or whatever tortured metaphor is appropriate).
Yeah. I think it was Derek Thompson(?) who said something like "social media was an experiment in building a room, letting everyone in, and rewarding the people who scream the loudest."
Can't remember where, but a few years ago I read an interview with an establishment Republican in one of the Carolinas who said something to the effect of "it used to be that every county-level party had a couple paranoid cranks who would say crazy stuff at party meetings that everyone just ignored. Facebook allowed all the cranks to find each other, form a caucus and then come to the state convention to create chaos."
That must have been before said crank caucus took over the state convention and tossed out all the normal folks.
A lot of the establishment types self-selected out and withdrew or became Bulwark Never Trumpers or Dispatch remnant conservatives. The ones with no principles like Scott Jennings and Matt Schlapp became grifters. Trump has been very good for their bottom lines.
Yeah a whole new giant graduating class from National Enquirer University.
Most of my friends and family are Trump supporters and you cannot discount the extent to which right wing media dominates social media. Most of these people don't identify as strong Trump supporters yet they're constantly sending me memes and posts from people like Benny Johnson and @the_typical_liberal.
Social Media has made it worse but these people have always had some influence, the anti-vaccine league took over Leicester council in the 1880s
Blaming all of this on intellectuals/technocrats is fashionable and it's good for elites to take ownership of their mistakes, but there does seem to be an unwillingness among people who talk about politics to admit how much appetite there has always been among non-elites to fully embrace anti-intellectualism. There just hadn't been a modern president who just fully gave such people their moment.
I think we need better nomenclature than “elites” too because depending on who you ask, a billionaire and his administration of billionaires, former senators, and think-tank galaxy brains would seem pretty elite. So what elite are we talking about? Educated professionals? Blue hair queer studies professors? The deep state? Anti-Israeli student protesters? The triple parentheses cabal that we’re told controls business, media, and Hollywood? Maybe we take the Rob Henderson approach and just make elite mean people I disagree with?
It's not just lib coded institutions. New Trad Caths hate the fact the Pope tells them to be nice to people and get your vaccines.
"Anyone I imagine looks down on me is elite, unless they're an entertainer I like."
That's a good question. "Elite" is perhaps best thought of as a term for who controls mainstream information. There was a 5-10 year period where advertising, tech, academia, mainstream media, Disney, etc. had shifted the Overton Window to exclude things like support for law enforcement, opposition to immigration, refusal to separate gender from sex, opposition to affirmative action, and so on. Whatever the merits or lack thereof of those stances, it represented a form of elite influence since something like 40% of the country got excluded in this manner.
I’ll agree with you on some of this, but support for law enforcement in mainstream media never went anywhere. Cop procedurals and true crime are two of the largest genres in TV, literature and podcasting and have been consistently.
The argument against this goes back to a common point Matt has made, which is that some of the biggest shifts to the left in the mainstream media have come from culture/lifestyle content. There absolutely were a lot of navel gazing pieces in 2020 around "copaganda" - I remember an Alan Sepinwall column specifically rending garments around his previous love of the show "Justified." That said - you're 100% right that cop procedurals never actually went away.
Look as a former anti-SJW conservative debate bro myself, let me tell you what's really going on. Conservatives were never silenced, you could easily find communities, media, and institutions where conservative sentiments thrived. I frequented several. They just weren't as prestigious, i.e. popular among smart, important people. And as this trend gained steam and started to trickle down into the masses, that's when they went berserk because waning popularity feels like losing and losing makes people mad. Losing makes people lash out and become conspiratorial. Which is exactly what happened among conservatives.
It's no different than the losing sports team blaming the refs. Maybe you can point to a couple blown calls as Matt has done, but that's not REALLY what it's about. They're angry because they lost and they're grasping for excuses.
Right, there's an element of looking to certain cultural indicators (WaPo, NYT, etc.) instead of others in determining what the zeitgeist is - meanwhile, Blue Bloods is one of the best-performing TV shows out there. There's a certain internet narrative where tastemakers like the aforementioned outlets are considered "mainstream media" whereas the media that people are actually watching is considered a whisper in the background. Ultimately, tens of thousands people more watched Boston Blue than read Sepinwall's column, but there's still the idea that mainstream media excludes things like Boston Blue.
I agree those shows didn't go away, but my recollection is that, besides what ATX Jake mentioned, several of the shows produced some semi-cringe apologetic episodes for the following season.
I know Brooklyn 99 did for an episode, but then it went right back to being a wholesome comedy about witty cops catching bad guys. It's just strange to me that relatively small-scale lifestyle columns in liberal newspapers and individual cringey episodes of otherwise very pro-LEO TV shows are "mainstream media" while Fox News and the other 23 episodes per season of Blue Bloods, NCIS, Paw Patrol, etc. are somehow excluded. "Try That in a Small Town" was a billboard top hit (higher than any Chappell Roan)! It's like the fixation on the Ivies when the vast majority of university students go to state schools.
If mainstream media is what people widely actually watch/listen to/read, rather than just the chattering class on the internet, then it's far more centrist/right-wing than how we portray it.
Say more.
-I asked ChatGPT the other day whether Azerbaijan is a Third World country. The first paragraph of its answer lectured me on how morally objectionable it is to use "Third World", before getting to the point and talking about Azerbaijan's level of economic development, political institutions, etc.
-Not only MSNBC and Variety magazine, but ABC, The Washington Post, etc., released material sympathetic to the idea that the American Eagle jeans ad was "racist", "fascist", etc.
i mean since the term third world is a reference to countries not aligned with the USSR or the US during the cold war the question seems like a bit of a category error?
I apologize for being a blue haired queer professor who is not a professor of anything studies.
Clearly not elite enough!
Lots of crank anti-intellectual views are popular among the elite. RFK Jr is the nephew of a president and son of a senator, lots of people in Hollywood supported his views until recently. A lot more CEOs, politicians and journalists than anyone wants to admit think carrot juice is better than chemo. Elites are smarter than non-elites but all groups of people have lots of people who are just really dumb.
yes the true elite has some truly bonkers views that they are able to make work by having so much money. It's kind of like the midwit meme except the midwits are actually right/better.
It doesn't work for them, Steve Jobs delayed Chemo for 9 months to try his juice cleanse, Private Schools teach their students Growth Mindset, I am sure lots of wealthy divorces are started because a spouse receives bad advice from their astrologer.
yes true. Though I guess I mean people like Tom Cruise etc. can be parts of rather nutty religions and still have social and professional success mostly because they are huge stars who are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
To his credit, I would argue Tom Cruise has stayed successful because he took the advice years ago to shut up about his personal life in public.
See also Goop.
Yes - as much as I am loath to give credit, it's clear that there was at least some bipartisan consensus against the cranks that was maintained primarily by pre-Trump Republican party elites, which has completely collapsed.
That's of course not to say that the pre-Trump Republican party didn't have other problems.
I wonder how much of that was held together by the needs of fighting the Cold War, especially when parts of the New Left lost their minds back then and conservatives often seemed like adults (like Fukuyama not being able to relate to the hippies when he was a student). That was already starting to crack with W and the neocons.
But, if the neocons weren't "elites," then the term has no meaning. They were basically all national security academics and "experts," and what Democratic support of the war there was at the beginning was anchored by trust in the "experts."
The neocons had a bit of their own anti-expert bias though. I believe it Douglas Feith who told people who were applying to jobs at the Pentagon that knowing Arabic would be a bad thing for their career. Powell's WMD presentation to the UN was notoriously cherrypicked and received a lot of pushback internally (including some from Powell himself). The Iraq War was also unpopular among Middle East experts outside of Heritage and AEI. The neocons were this weird group in academia and think tanks that everyone else thought was weird, with the exception of Fukuyama. And that's not even getting into issues like the Bush administration's approach to climate change, stem cell research, etc.
There wasn't a bipartisan consensus against cranks, Obama wanted RFK jr at the EPA, Tulsi was vice chair of the DNC, General Flynn was Obama's director of Defence Intelligence. Trump has made things much worse, but for some reason it hasn't normally been the procedure to check if someone is balanced before giving them power.
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/11/obama-considers-stars-for-cabinet-015320
I think the fact that even the military was considered too lib for Trump really calls into question how much something like the CDC can do to get on the "right" side of this stuff.
elites need to own their own ineffectiveness in actually transmitting their own values (even [especially?] among themselves), and also living up to them, and so on.
having the cultural bully pulpit and asking everyone to "imagine" is cringe when you live in a mansion. (in case of Hollywood elites it's literal mansions, in case of academia it's tenure, for the press it's a captive audience, for doctors it's a all of the above - but mostly being shielded from the cost-ineffectiveness of their work, and so on.)
and in general cost-benefit aspects completely ignored for decades in the Amazing All American enterprise. (War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on War, War on Racism, and now the latest installment War on Woke)
Sure, but this is kind of an example of what I'm talking about: "a large socio-professional fraction needs to change their behavior" is fine as far as it goes, but it's pretty tired at this point and it's not really a theory of change.
do you mean it's not an effective recipe for guaranteed success, or do you mean that it's a bad theory because it doesn't explain anything (or because of other reason(s))?
Largely the former. Admonishing a large and diverse group to change their ways, especially when those ways are bound up in socioprofessional identity and esteem, is just not easy to do.
As I say, it's not inaccurate - a large socio-professional fraction really did collectively get out over their skis and thought of their position as self-evidentially righteous - but I guess see above for why pointing this out over and over is not really going to convince them to change accordingly.
I think where it gets hard is defining elites--I think some people think of elites as those who do set the agenda, meaning media executives, big firm lawyers, top consultants, senior firm managers, etc. (maybe 2% of the population or less). Others just mean any old professional with a college degree or anyone on that track (maybe 30% of the population or more).
I know that with college educated parents I interact with there is a ton of "value transmission" mostly around trying to help your kids navigate difficulties with school and screentime. It is true that Democrats as a policy matter are less comfortable than Republicans in espousing personal habits as a solution to things (there is much more comfort in blaming systemic issues).
But I do wonder if this will change as historically conservative suburban professionals exit the Trump GOP.
Strong disagree. I distinctly remember the GWB administration going hard against any concept of expertise and academic life, while telling us government is the problem and the bureaucracy is useless. I doubt many of them really believed it - they all went to Ivy Leagues. This was pre-woke, when gay marriage bans were popular across the states.
The chickens have come home to roost! True believers run the show now. The Trump personal loyalty aspect escalated things, but the seeds were there.
A completely ignored but quintessential attribute of the "experts" is that they have a strong inclination for self policing. NYTimes issues lots of retractions while Fox News issues none. MAGA takes this as evidence NYT is wrong and Fox is not.
The Iraq War as a classic instance of the Bush administration disdaining and ignoring expertise in favor of blind ideological agendas. It rejected the dense, exhaustive State Department study of Iraq and the challenges of regime change, it had Rumsfeld tossing out all the recommendations (e.g., regarding force size) experts in DoD were pushing him to adopt as the deployment took shape. It made sure that no expert or anyone with any area expertise was allowed anywhere near the Coalitional Provisional Authority in Baghdad after the initial phase of the war.
Of course, countering that was the cool, calm and professional approach the administration took toward Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.
The thing about the Iraq War was that even not very bright me, two weeks into a geopolitics of the Middle East course, was like “this seems like a terrible idea.” All you have to know is that there are Shiites, and Sunnis, and they don’t care for one another, and already that puts a huge hole in the “Iraq will function perfectly well in the absence of a strongman dictator” thesis.
Really? I'm pretty sure
GWB actually was a big believer in bio defense
No but that's my point, they had plenty of experts and valued expert opinion, but they denigrated the idea of "experts" to smear Democrats.
Now they all drank from the well they poisoned
Disagreement isn't smearing.
Yes, he started the national strategy for pandemic influenza preparedness.
Thanks that's what I was thinking of. I think he read a book about the Spanish Flu and was moved to take action against it.
[White House. 9:00 PM. George W. Bush in flannel pajamas reading in bed next to his wife]: "Laura, get a load of this! You ever hear about that dang Spanish Flu? No bueno! Gonna call Turd Blossom first thing in the AM!"
Sometimes I wonder if RFK Jr and his ilk even believe in germs or viruses or cancer. They all seem to think that disease is the product of moral failings: eat impure foods, don’t get enough sunlight, too fat. Sure, our behaviors have impacts on our health! Nobody doubts that. But it seems like all they care about is scolding people into a healthy lifestyle and buying nutritional supplements. That says to me they don’t think germs are real.
Totally - much like conspiracy theorists they can't deal with the fact that sometimes random bad things happen and no one is to blame. Every bad thing must be intentionally caused by someone.
Did you hear Lilly's husband died? No. What happened? Brain tumor apparently. He was only 42.
What actually happened? In some cases a random cosmic ray hit a strand of DNA causing a mutation that led to the cancer. But then that means a random cosmic ray could hit my DNA and I could just die. It's far more comforting, for some people, to believe that Lilly's husband just wasn't eating clean and getting enough exercise. Or that big business or big pharma conspired to cause the tumor.
It sure as shit can't be that random shit happens and you get a headache and go the doctor and they find a giant inoperable brian tumor.
Having the misfortune to have a conspiracy theorist as a mother-in-law, I can confirm that there are definitely people who do not believe in viruses. (I've never encountered any reference to someone not believing in "cancer" as such though. They just attribute it to wacky things.)
I think it's because with cancer you can, in many cases, see it and feel it. Viruses you can't see even with a standard optical microscope.
My parents have joined the sunscreen is bad movement. They are going to cure the world's vitamin D deficiencies one case of melanoma at a time.
They aren't totally wrong.
Oh God, the vitamin D deficiency thing!
Do they believe in bacteria and prions?
Bacteria, yes, at least implicitly, because it's a big deal to use alcohol-based cleaning products to disinfect surfaces and I can't recall her ever posting anything against taking antibiotics. Prions, I don't know, because prion-caused diseases haven't been in the news much in the time I've known her.
There are tons of people who believe in "cleansing" their body of toxins through some combination of extreme diets, saunas (sweating out the toxins), OTC supplements, etc. Heck, Steve Jobs -- not a dumb guy -- tried to treat his pancreatic cancer with fruits and vegetables, herbal remedies, juicing and bowel cleansing.
There are a lot of people who don't believe in medical science and think they can self-diagnose and self-medicate themselves more effectively than their doctor.
And now one is HHS secretary!
This might be worth skimming:
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/14/nx-s1-5429732/ancient-miasma-theory-may-help-explain-health-secretary-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-vaccine-moves
The weird thing is that during the pandemic, being anti-miasma-theory is why the medical establishment was so slow to endorse masking - it’s all the cultural memory of the miasma people being so wrong about Semmelweis and handwashing, that they couldn’t believe that anything but handwashing was relevant. It’s a shame that the actual proponents of miasma theory didn’t follow it to the conclusion that masks are useful.
Eh, I wouldn't say it's anti-miasma theory (unless you think intra-discipline debates about aerosolized droplets vs "airborne" are the anti-miasma theory that became entrenched).
I think the fatal flaw was over-indexing on pan flu scenarios, which is what most people in public health thought would be the Big One. Handwashing would have been really great advice if we were facing pan flu. Since it's costless/cheap, we should run out handwashing recommendations immediately for any novel infection.
People also like to say NPIs/other nonvax precautions were pointless during covid, but I'd encourage people to go look at flu deaths during the same period as the pandemic. The stuff we were doing really would work for pan flu, it was just not the right approach for a different virus. Covid is an annoying virus to deal with.
Yeah, Linsey Marr convinced me that a lot of the early mistakes about droplet size and aerosols got entrenched because of how they fit nicely with anti-miasma theory.
I’m skeptical that hand washing is very effective for flu either - I just suspect that the mild social distancing and bit of masking that even incautious people were doing in 2020 was reducing the transmissibility of everything respiratory by a factor of 2 or 3, and covid just had a much higher transmissibility due to a completely immunologically naive population.
I think we have pretty good evidence handwashing works for flu and other viruses like noro, but it's definitely not sufficient on its own to prevent transmission at the population level.
And I think I understand what you mean by anti-miasma theory now with the Linsey Marr reference; she was part of the (correct) side during the airborne vs droplets war. This takes us to a different place and sort of intra-field dynamics in PH, but infectious disease people were the main proponents of the droplet side, whereas environmental folks were on the airborne side pushing for things like HVAC throughput. For better or worse, infectious disease people rule public health and hold all the levers, so they won all the early debates until it was obvious they were wrong, to our detriment.
But noro isn't an enveloped virus, so handwashing isn't as effective as it is for flu or COVID. It's better than not washing, but some germs still remain unless you stick your hands in Clorox for a few minutes (which is inadvisable).
Yeah, this tracks.
RFK JRkoff does in fact dispute germ theory, and instead favors miasmas as the cause of disease.
There were a number of people, including a handful in this very comment section, who were 'cautiously optimistic' about RFK's tenure, that he would be hemmed in on drug regulation by pharma lobbyists and general pro-business Republican opinion, and would instead focus on things like banning red 40 and launching investigations into microplastics and stuff.
This was always foolish. It is bad to give morons power, and even worse to give conspiracy-minded crank morons power (and still worse to give power to conspiracy-minded crank morons who have had pieces of their brain eaten by a worm, but i digress...)
I am reminded of an article Milan wrote where he mentioned a few young people he knew and their various political opinions, and one of them was a seemingly smart young guy who supported RFK for president because of Health. I do not know what is the deal with Health (capitalized because Health as some sort of symbolic-religious object of veneration is clearly not the same thing as the health studied empirically by medical researchers) but it keeps oneshotting otherwise normal people and turning them into fools who are trusting of conspiracists and excessively skeptical of everyone else, as though 'eat healthy and work out' was arcane advice that had been hidden from them by the occult priesthood of science which can never be trusted again now that they know the Forbidden Truth of going to the gym and cutting out junk food.
I was never "cautiously optimistic" about RFK, Jr., but I am still genuinely shocked at the number of major industries in a variety of sectors that have just instantly rolled over and died on the spot without even a peep.
The thing is that the ex ante case for RFK not doing stupid things doesn't look that dumb: he adds no particular value to Trump's political coalition post-election (no need to cater to the marginal crank vote during a second term), and Trump is obsessed with catering to perceived market desires. The surprising thing isn't that RFK is a crackpot, it's that he's a crackpot being given an arbitrarily long leash despite this being genuinely bad for Republican- (and even Trump-)favored constituencies without any obvious payoff.
It doesn't even work on the level of vibes because pre-election Trump was, if anything, happy to claim *credit* for vaccines and thus (unlike with solar and wind) there's presumably no personal animus at play to counterbalance this failure of the kind of low cunning instrumentalism that is the one thing he's extremely competent at.
It's a crime, but it's *also* a mistake.
The long leash is because of RFK's last name. Trump's brain is stuck in 1987, and back then in NYC, "John John" was like the prince of the city. Having a Kennedy nominally on side probably does something to his ego.
This may well be true, although unfortunately I have no way to evaluate it.
A Kennedy not just onside but subservient and dependent on him checks all the boxes for Trump.
I think this is downstream of consolidation. When a company does something like JUST RNA, they need to not be banned to survive. If a company does RNA vaccines and a dozen other things, better to sacrifice the RNA wing and not draw the ire of powerful people to punish them. It is very corrosive.
Unfortunately, the "rolling over and dying" is baked in at this point.
Probably not quite kosher, but every time I see a photo of RFK I think "A man's face is his autobiography" and wonder what the heck he's done to get that face...
I've always been skeptical of giving Trump so much credit for OWS, and reading through this article just confirmed this prior. Trump has always cared mosr about what will sate his ego and make him look good and be praised. And while he was being lackadasical with the pandemic in general, opposition to pandemic caution was very much naturally occurring muchnmore among Republicans, something that I think was always baked in. Even when Trump tried to save his ego by claiming how great "his" vaccines were, he would get pushback from his most loyal MAGAs. It's not surprising he's gone down the road he has in this regard when seeing the resistance in his base.
Also, while it's tempting to just invoke Cleek's Law (today's Republican thought is the opposite of what Democrats want today: updated daily), I do think Democrats need to seriously purge and criticize the strain of degrowther ascetic thought that sometimes permeates through. Matt listed a bunch of examples of how suspicious some people are of Democrats demanding sacrifice in quality of life for causes that many people don't share. By making sure they're not going to be excessively haughty over those things, it'll help build better credibility when a real and sudden need to practice short term sacrifice is warranted.
"demanding sacrifice in quality of life for causes that many people don't share" isn't just limited to degrowthers. It is also a feature of fanatics around lots of causes -- environmentalists, evangelicals, animal rights, abortion.
People who prioritize telling others (either through hectoring or legislating) how to live and what to buy generate more backlash and are generally people I try to avoid. I prefer the ones who try to put forth convincing arguments instead.
Agreed--I tried to be more inclusive with "Matt listed a bunch of causes", and you added a few more here that are on the other end of contemporary partisan divides.
Maybe I'm a fanatic, but I've been demanding (or at least suggesting) sacrifices that might accrue if Portland sticks to its sanctuary city status in defiance of DOJ's threatening letter of August 13. Also trying to come up with ways we can collectively mitigate the harms to vulnerable populations arising from the shut-off of federal grants.
Stuff like this is why I’m increasingly convinced that we absolutely need the economy to nose dive into stagflation to save the country. Because I think I’m on solid ground saying inflation numbers being not great but not yet disastrous and unemployment numbers being the same is what’s keep the floor so high on Trump’s support*.
There are depressingly a lot of candidates for the worst possible long term outcomes of this administration but the havoc being wrecked by RFK Jr. is to me top of the list. Assuming we still have fair elections in 2026 and 2028 (I’m increasingly worried about that with this military gambit in DC) we can undo a lot of the dumbest Trump policies without horrible damage.
But there will be countless number of people unnecessarily dead because of RFK Jr’s insanity. And stuff like this is where I have the absolute least amount of sympathy for Trump fans. I’m 100% with Matt that Dems need to flip at least a small number of Trump voters to win the senate and 2028 presidency. So to that end, I’m for candidates being moderate where appropriate and being “respectful” to marginal Trump voters. But right now? I’m not running for office. I’m not trying to reach marginal voters. So my chance to yell into the void. Fuck you hardcore Trumpers. Sorry not sorry that a blue haired lefty living in Brooklyn you never met got too over their skis about trans rights on Twitter. So Biden administration was being a bit too solicitous of super left gender stuff in public pronouncements. This means we need to have thousands of people unnecessarily die in the coming years when there could have been vaccines for them? Is this really what you wanted?!
* The CPI numbers were not nearly as positive yesterday as the stocks market would imply (they were good enough that a rate cut is more likely so stocks appropriately went up). Core and super core inflation is ticking up. Shelter inflation and energy kept CPI down (the former is a big part of why CPI inflation may be muted next 12 months). Businesses so far are laying off workers in response and trying to hold off price increases. This can’t last.
Speaking of laying off workers. Hey GOP donor community. There is no way not having monthly BLS data is good for your business. There is no way an absolute garbage hack from Heritage foundation is good for business. You have any sway with senators now is the time to use it.
A 2008 style global financial crisis based on crypto would be very helpful.
The problem is how Dems will react. In 2020 voters were tired of Trump's BS. So they elected Biden who campaigned on a return to normalcy.
But when he won Dems took it as what voters REALLY wanted was Woke FDR 2.0 !!!
Thus we got Trump again.
If Biden had governed like Bill Clinton instead this almost certainly wouldn't have happened.
But I am very concerned that if voters elect another Dem president in 2028 they will make the same mistake again.
I just learned that the husband of an acquaintance was approached about being the head of BLS. The husband is a rock-ribbed conservative and very deeply Catholic, but he's not stupid. He would have been so much better. But of course he didn't want to work with the Trump administration. 😭
Before, it could be argued that serving in the administration would perhaps help keep policy on a relatively normal track. Not anymore, unfortunately. If the husband had taken the job and done it properly, he might well have been publicly fired too, after considerable personal sacrifice. Nice to see that there are still some people out there who call themselves “conservative” and actually are.
Once company supply lines are set up for tariffs and govt is spending the tariff money in the budget, may be hard to unwind.
What frustrates me most about the selfish, nihilistic MAGA worldview is that they completely miss the power of collective action. They don’t understand that when we pool our resources, or vaccinate to create herd immunity, or—simply put—work as a team, we create better outcomes for EVERYONE, themselves included.
Honestly, I’ve pretty much had it with their petulance.
It’s high time for like-minded states to band together and (re)create institutions that allow us to act collectively for the public good. If EPA, FEMA, NIH etc can’t work at the federal level anymore, we should to find a way to create alternative super-state (but sub-national) structures for institutions like them, even if that means cutting out some states from disaster insurance or cutting edge medicine.
Unfortunately, interstate compacts require Congressional approval.
Really? Time for the West Coast to secede then
"That's communism!"
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."
Let's do a quick counterfactual: what if there had there been neither government shutdowns, nor government welfare, nor bailouts, nor forbearance of evictions, foreclosures and cancellations.
Over and above the economic catastrophe that all the additional deaths would have caused, enough people would have quietly stopped going out to put establishments out of business. The business owners and their employees would have just been SOL. (Shit-Outta-Luck.) Landlords and mortgage holders, for all their bitching about the eviction moratorium, would have been SOL in turn. Cellphone and broadband providers, cable tv, streaming services, everyone would be SOL without the coordinated effort to assign blame, align expectations and provide the emergency relief that was needed and widely know to be needed..
The depression would have lasted far longer and far worse. It would never have recovered until years after population growth resumed its 3% trend. And more billionaires would own an even more outlandishly outsized slice of everyone else's pie, having bought up even more assets and even lower fire sale prices.
Per dysphemystic treadmill reposting as separate comment fo visibility:
Also reminder that Monday 9/15 is a SLOW BORING AND STEADY HABITS HAPPY HOUR AT BAR IN NEW HAVEN! 6PM. It is happening at the same time as YIMBY Town 2025 and a brand spanking new YIMBY Action chapter (YIMBY South Central CT) founded by yours truly and some friends will also be around and looking to engage.
Slow Boring & Steady Habits
Date: Sep 15 • 6:00 pm
Location: 254 Crown Street, New Haven, CT 06511
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/slow-boring-steady-habits-tickets-1404469479019?aff=ebdsshother&utm_share_source=listing_android&sg=6cb9fdea91b97d51c8b538d40bd325c3dd3d06cccee2f5889ce22b1c5be19e09f0aea291a6f03eecb88b35444240293ab66b630330dd4e5fc9bbcb65ea9c55e24b2b38415dc0c8e745cc92e899
I will be at this event!
“…I will be at this event!….”
That’s a good reason to be there, and here’s a better one:
I will not be at this event!
Okay, but now you're *guaranteeing* that no one will read it, by putting my name in the top line. Better just to post the reminder bare.
I'm trying to build community here and we can't do that if we refuse to give credit and refer to each other by name
"...to build community here ...."
A laudable goal and a sensible principle.
But what if the name itself is a deterrent to further reading?
Meet everyone’s favorite mashed potato communist pizza lover Freddie DeBoer at the meetup!
In politics you expect to see rational argument, corruption, short sightedness and self interest, but so much of politics in every part of the ideological spectrum is driven by total lunatics.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Relatedly, the NIH director Jay Bhattacharya just published a ridiculous op-ed in the Washington Post giving his justification for why the NIH canceled mRNA research. It confirms what I had long suspected, that he is partisan hack with crank medical beliefs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/12/nih-mrna-vaccines-jay-bhattacharya/
"We're cancelling mRNA research because the public doesn't trust it, and as we all know, medicines, like fairies, only work if you believe".
I don't think it's wrong to say that vaccines that lack public trust have more issues than vaccines that do have public trust.
But doesn't it leave off the giant role this administration is having on _reducing_ that trust?
Clap three times if you believe in amoxicillin!
This was so disappointing. I wanted to give him the benefit of a doubt.
I forget if this article already posted here but I have a very hard time figuring out what is going on with Bhattacharya. Idk if he is totally radicalized or just weak:
https://archive.ph/lC0qe