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).
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!
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?
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?
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
“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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
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!"
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?
“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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Asking from ignorance, but if mRNA cancer research is so promising why wouldn't the private market step in to cover that gap?
The total addressable market and profit opportunities are massive, this doesn't seem like the kind of promising thing that if the govt doesn't fund no one will. And while it's not good that he's giving credence to the mRNA tech hate even the most zealous MAGA supporter will probably take a vaccine over chemo or death, it's cancer ffs.
Some basic research has been funded by various government entities for a long time. When it gets closer to an actual product, companies take on the product development. Especially for drug development, the costs of getting it through trials is extremely high and highly likely to fail. So there has been overall a general arrangement about the US government supporting more basic research and products being done by companies.
So much of medical research is extremely expensive without government support. Even if a particular form of research is promising, a lot of the research is going to go down dead ends since you won't fully know ahead of time what's going to fail, which in turn is lost investment. You need government to shoulder a lot of that risk for basic research.
But it’s not like they just need one more study to show that it works - there’s still a bunch of work that needs to be done to understand which cancers need to be approached how, and a lot of work on mRNA delivery that won’t even end up incorporated in this but will make one of your competitors a lot of profit 20 years from now when people understand what it’s good for and the patent has run out, and so on.
If it was just the last step, and they could put a patent on the thing, the private sector could do it. But promising research usually needs multiple steps, some of which wont pan out for this but might turn out to be useful for other things, and some of which will be useful but the patents will expire before they are useful.
My take is that this sort of early stage research requires several rounds of published papers and people iterating off of published information to get off the ground.
Since trying to get markets to pay the correct amount for information is one of the more cursed things in mechanism design, it's better for the government to fund this kind of research and then make it available on arXiv for free as a public good.
I imagine they'll do some of it but since it's pretty clear that vaccines just aren't going to be getting FDA approval going forward and there's little money in vaccines to begin with that line of inquiry just won't be advanced (in the United States).
He only has 3 more years in office and FDA approval is a long and ardous process. By the time they're ready the adults might be back in charge, and if not, you can always do the research here and get it approved in other countries.
The American patents are where the big value lies, not elsewhere. And while Trump may only have 3 more years, the Republican party will be in office for a bit more than 50% of the time forever. It's not immediately obvious that the rest of the party disagrees with the administration about this topic; if they do, they aren't saying so publicly.
It was literally only six years ago that the bulk of the anti-vaccine movement was left-coded, sharing memetic space with Whole Foods, bacon made out of tofu, and that social-studies teacher who always wore hemp.
I think this is a misconception, the “bulk” part. There was a lot written in the blue press and social media about the Marin County types because they were closer to home and the cognitive dissonance was maddening. But if you look at where the measles outbreaks happened I don’t think they were mostly in blue enclaves.
I remember an epidemiologist friend telling me in the early 2000s that the best correlate for measles in particular was distance to the nearest Whole Foods. The shift may have started earlier than I'm describing. In my defense, my daughter went to a Waldorf school, so I was exposed to an impressive number of those twee little sociopaths.
I remember researching the anti-vaccine movement in ~2014. There was a slight left skew, but the major trend was that being anti-vaccine was overrepresented among extreme political partisans from both the left and right.
An American pharmaceutical company isn’t going to invest capital into research for a product it has a high risk of not being able to sell in the US regardless of safety and efficacy. That basically turns the high risk/high reward model into a high risk/low reward model that doesn’t pencil.
If government skepticism has the potential to bleed into things like FDA review, Medicare reimbursement, etc., the private market has to include that risk in its allocation of capital.
Trump is ideological. Maoist almost. It would have been easy to spin a booming economy, lower crime rates as a Trumpian success but he chose ideology. Imagine if Trump cured cancer…but no, let’s cut everything.
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.
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).
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…
"...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?
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
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
"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.
Sure. But I doubt he’d disagree. Boise is a little blue dot in a sea of deep red
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.
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.
Perhaps we should start a rumor that the President was a registered Democrat from August 2001 until September 2009?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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.
Negative partisanship is a hell of a drug....
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.
“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%
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)
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."
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.
Because she married JD, she and the children have been designated Honorary Americans.
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.
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.
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.
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 apologize for being a blue haired queer professor who is not a professor of anything studies.
Clearly not elite enough!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really? I'm pretty sure
GWB actually was a big believer in bio defense
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.
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.
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.
Yep that's how we got FDR
"...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."
"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.
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....
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.
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?
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.
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.
Matt should go if Freddie says he’s coming. They could livestream from BAR.
Wow, he rarely engages in back-and-forth; he's more of a drive-by commenter kind of guy.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
Yeah, this tracks.
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.
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!"
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.
Once company supply lines are set up for tariffs and govt is spending the tariff money in the budget, may be hard to unwind.
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.
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.
Asking from ignorance, but if mRNA cancer research is so promising why wouldn't the private market step in to cover that gap?
The total addressable market and profit opportunities are massive, this doesn't seem like the kind of promising thing that if the govt doesn't fund no one will. And while it's not good that he's giving credence to the mRNA tech hate even the most zealous MAGA supporter will probably take a vaccine over chemo or death, it's cancer ffs.
Some basic research has been funded by various government entities for a long time. When it gets closer to an actual product, companies take on the product development. Especially for drug development, the costs of getting it through trials is extremely high and highly likely to fail. So there has been overall a general arrangement about the US government supporting more basic research and products being done by companies.
So much of medical research is extremely expensive without government support. Even if a particular form of research is promising, a lot of the research is going to go down dead ends since you won't fully know ahead of time what's going to fail, which in turn is lost investment. You need government to shoulder a lot of that risk for basic research.
Vaccines and antibiotics are traditionally low margin but high societal importance, and it’s hard to build an actual business case on that.
But as MY explained these are not broad cheap vaccines but custom ones engineered specifically for your DNA. That sounds like a high margin product.
But it’s not like they just need one more study to show that it works - there’s still a bunch of work that needs to be done to understand which cancers need to be approached how, and a lot of work on mRNA delivery that won’t even end up incorporated in this but will make one of your competitors a lot of profit 20 years from now when people understand what it’s good for and the patent has run out, and so on.
If it was just the last step, and they could put a patent on the thing, the private sector could do it. But promising research usually needs multiple steps, some of which wont pan out for this but might turn out to be useful for other things, and some of which will be useful but the patents will expire before they are useful.
My take is that this sort of early stage research requires several rounds of published papers and people iterating off of published information to get off the ground.
Since trying to get markets to pay the correct amount for information is one of the more cursed things in mechanism design, it's better for the government to fund this kind of research and then make it available on arXiv for free as a public good.
I imagine they'll do some of it but since it's pretty clear that vaccines just aren't going to be getting FDA approval going forward and there's little money in vaccines to begin with that line of inquiry just won't be advanced (in the United States).
He only has 3 more years in office and FDA approval is a long and ardous process. By the time they're ready the adults might be back in charge, and if not, you can always do the research here and get it approved in other countries.
The American patents are where the big value lies, not elsewhere. And while Trump may only have 3 more years, the Republican party will be in office for a bit more than 50% of the time forever. It's not immediately obvious that the rest of the party disagrees with the administration about this topic; if they do, they aren't saying so publicly.
It was literally only six years ago that the bulk of the anti-vaccine movement was left-coded, sharing memetic space with Whole Foods, bacon made out of tofu, and that social-studies teacher who always wore hemp.
I think this is a misconception, the “bulk” part. There was a lot written in the blue press and social media about the Marin County types because they were closer to home and the cognitive dissonance was maddening. But if you look at where the measles outbreaks happened I don’t think they were mostly in blue enclaves.
Yeah, this was already starting to shift pre-covid. Trump embraced antivax nonsense during the 2016 primary debates.
I remember an epidemiologist friend telling me in the early 2000s that the best correlate for measles in particular was distance to the nearest Whole Foods. The shift may have started earlier than I'm describing. In my defense, my daughter went to a Waldorf school, so I was exposed to an impressive number of those twee little sociopaths.
I remember researching the anti-vaccine movement in ~2014. There was a slight left skew, but the major trend was that being anti-vaccine was overrepresented among extreme political partisans from both the left and right.
An American pharmaceutical company isn’t going to invest capital into research for a product it has a high risk of not being able to sell in the US regardless of safety and efficacy. That basically turns the high risk/high reward model into a high risk/low reward model that doesn’t pencil.
If government skepticism has the potential to bleed into things like FDA review, Medicare reimbursement, etc., the private market has to include that risk in its allocation of capital.
It’s always better for a thing to be done by the public sector than the private sector
Trump is ideological. Maoist almost. It would have been easy to spin a booming economy, lower crime rates as a Trumpian success but he chose ideology. Imagine if Trump cured cancer…but no, let’s cut everything.
Trump isn’t ideological, Miller and Vought are
Good point - but Maoism is also much less ideological than Stalinism, or especially Leninism. It’s much more a cult of personality.
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/
This was so disappointing. I wanted to give him the benefit of a doubt.
"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".