Making America Ignorant Again
Facts Are What Trump Says
You can’t have widespread bigotry without ignorance and superstition.
If you look at today’s reactionaries through the lens of dark age economics and culture, “MAGA” really means put white men in charge, again. This view of the world ignores the fact that Caucasian patriarchs were never vanquished, but they were (mostly politely) asked to share influence in politics, culture, and science.
Now, that asking has been declared illegal, though there is no law saying so.
Although the Trump administration is getting its ass whipped* in court, new executive orders, threats, and implementations are rolling out the White House doors seven days a week, in between Presidential golf outings.
*As of last Friday, political scientist Adam Bonica has calculated that the Trump administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.
This is wonderful news, sort of, except that it glosses over the damage being done to the economy, science, equality, and culture.
Take the National Science Foundation, for instance. According to Science magazine, the organization is eliminating all 37 of its research divisions, restructuring its grant-making process, laying off staff and canceling over $1 billion in already-awarded grants.
The bottom line in this instance will be/is that expertise/experience will be devalued in favor of the ideological restraints; basic research, i.e. testing hypotheses through experimentation and observation will be limited to those areas prioritized by an authoritarian government.
From Forbes Magazine:
We also need to be clear about the costs of disinvestment. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas — hardly a partisan institution — finds that nondefense government R&D yields long-run economic returns of 150% to 300% and accounts for roughly a quarter of American productivity growth since World War II. The authors, economists Andrew Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens, conclude bluntly: “Our findings therefore point to a misallocation of public capital, and substantial underinvestment in nondefense R&D.”
There is nothing wasteful or elitist about public investment in science. On the contrary, it is one of the most reliable drivers of shared prosperity — benefiting not just institutions or industries, but society as a whole. Now is the time to expand that commitment, not withdraw from it.
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Sorry Forbes, it’s that “shared prosperity” that will be excised from R&D. The only sharing that will be going on will be the tributes paid to the upper tiers of the political ladder, and only then after Dear Leader gets his cut.
There is plenty to criticize about government research support, especially transparency in the science fields, but what’s happening at the National Science Foundation amounts to throwing out the baby with the bath water.
A model of a future without flourishing scientific research can be found with Great Britain, which experienced a rapid decline in Nobel Prize awards after 1979. That coincides with the government of Margaret Thatcher slashing funding for basic research because it was not considered to be of value to industry.
Now scientists involved in research in the United States are fleeing abroad.
President Trump’s recent executive order is supposed to promote “gold standard science” through transparency, replication, and taking swift action to correct errors and punish misconduct. These are all good concepts, except that political interference from disseminating scientific findings is not included on this list.
Restoring Gold Standard Science gives a political appointee the power to decide when those findings need to be “corrected” and to take disciplinary action against those seen as the perpetrators of misinformation.
Right on time, the Secretary of Health issued his own proclamation, threatening to stop government scientists from publishing their work in major medical journals, citing the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, three of the most influential medical journals in the world.
RFKjr has a point when it comes to criticizing the influence of big pharma on research, but cutting off dissemination of findings by (presumably under the Trump administration) scientists using “objective” methodology is a win for superstition and grifters. You can expect future findings to act as an economic stimulus engine for the corrupt but lucrative wellness, influencer, and snake oil industries.
On the other hand, speaking of grift: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and FDA chief Marty Makary recently launched their own journal, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, which they say will promote open discourse.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has eliminated more than a dozen data-gathering programs that track deaths and disease. Gone are decades of public-health data, removed as part of the “ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility.” This includes both previously published research and works in progress.
Via a Propublica article on disappearing government data:
Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.
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SIDEBAR: Here’s a bit of data I’m sure will be round-filed, via Christa Brown:
New Research: More Evangelicals Correlates with More Homicides
In the forthcoming article, “Institutional Anomie, Religious Ecologies, and Violence in American Communities,” the authors look at how religious adherent rates relate to murder rates in counties across the United States. The article will be published in Social Forces and the pre-print is available for download here. Below is the abstract.
Institutional anomie theory (IAT) posits that religion is a social institution that influences crime, yet religion has been relatively neglected in empirical research on IAT. We elaborate the role of religion within IAT, methodologically differentiate religious traditions, and empirically test hypotheses regarding local religious ecologies and community homicide over time in the U.S. In analyses of county-level panel data, we find that increases in the evangelical Protestant adherent rate are directly associated with increases in homicide rates, while increases in the Catholic adherent rate are directly associated with decreases in homicide rates. Using spatial analysis to examine spillover effects from adjacent locations, increases in the Catholic adherent rate and the evangelical Protestant adherent rate are indirectly associated with increases in homicide, while increases in the mainline Protestant adherent rate are indirectly associated with decreases in homicide. The total effect (both direct and indirect) for changes in the evangelical Protestant adherent rate is the largest in the model. In sum, elaborating and extending IAT, this study theorizes and then demonstrates the importance of differentiating between specific religious traditions for understanding spatial and temporal patterns in crime.
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Anti education/critical thinking and basic ignorance is considered a high virtue for MAGA. It’s manifesting through the Trump administration’s actions aimed at punishing academia.
The Big Beautiful Budget bill passed by the House of Representatives would use the federal tax code to offer vouchers that students could use to attend private secular or religious schools, even in states where voters have opposed such efforts.
The “school choice” mantra has convinced some voters of the value of vouchers. The objective evidence says that vouchers get used by parents with children already in private schools. The parallel education system represented by Charter Schools has, with few exceptions, proved to be no better than “government schools” (the pejorative term used by libertarians), and rife with fraud via payments to for-profit management companies.
The Trump administration’s assault on higher education in general, and ivy league colleges in particular, took a turn yesterday from supposedly rooting out antisemites, woke radicals, and dangerous terrorists to being about “helping” young, aspiring Americans, particularly those in the working class.
Presidential tweet:
I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!
Once again, talk is cheap, coming out of the White House. Greg Sargent at The New Republic:
That’s because the “big, beautiful bill” that House Republicans passed last week—which Trump has urged Senate Republicans to adopt—could make attending college harder for countless such kids. For a detailed summary of its changes, see this piece by The New Republic’s Monica Potts: They would make it harder for full-time students to qualify for Pell Grants, bump off large numbers of part-time students, and restrict access to the program and other financial assistance for higher education in numerous other ways.
Indeed, a coalition of education advocacy organizations estimates that the bill’s changes to Pell Grants alone could deprive as many as 700,000 people of eligibility entirely and hit many more with higher costs. As Potts summarizes, all this “takes an ax to one of the few reliable ladders for working-class people seeking higher education” as an “engine for social mobility.” These are mostly poorer and working-class students by definition, many with jobs or young kids of their own.
“Across multiple education provisions in this bill, the data is clear: Millions of college students will wind up paying a lot more, and low-income students will be by far the hardest hit,” Jonathan Fansmith, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, told me. “Hundreds of thousands of them will lose financial aid eligibility and their ability to afford college in the first place.”
Rather than go into any more detail about this aversion to truth, I'll close with Adam Serwer at the Atlantic’s analysis entitled The New Dark Age
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
U.S. Tourism Industry Struggling To Stay Afloat With Sixty-one percent Decrease In Visitors As Trump-Era Policies Deter Foreign Travelers Via Travel and Tour World
This decline in U.S. tourism comes at a time when other countries are thriving in the global tourism market. In fact, international travel has been booming in many parts of the world, with Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America seeing record-breaking numbers of visitors. Countries like Spain, Italy, and Thailand have capitalized on the growth of the global tourism industry, offering appealing experiences that draw in tourists from all corners of the globe. These destinations, unlike the U.S., have made efforts to create more inclusive, welcoming environments for visitors, with a focus on sustainability, cultural exchange, and relaxation.
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This ZIP Code Bill Is a Trojan Horse for Wealthy Suburbs Via Dissent in Bloom
While Boebert claims that giving these towns their own ZIP Codes will “improve insurance rates, mail delivery, response times, and access to public services,” she is implicitly blaming the current shared ZIP Code setup for holding those towns back. And who are they currently sharing with? Nearby communities that are poorer, more racially diverse, or statistically less “desirable.”
Most of the towns selected are in Republican-leaning districts. These are not struggling areas. They are fast-growing, politically conservative, and already well-resourced. Giving them a new ZIP Code is not a fix. It is a reward. It gives these communities a stronger public profile, higher property values, and cleaner data just in time for the next election cycle.
This is not just about mail. It is about shaping political power. With better metrics and more focused boundaries, these ZIPs become prime targets for developers, campaign donors, and redistricting maps. Meanwhile, the communities left behind, often poorer, more diverse, or more progressive, lose funding, visibility, and influence. Boebert is not just cleaning up ZIP Codes. She is cleaning up voting blocs.
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The Joe Rogan of the Left by Mark Sumner at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Placers
However, even though I was born in the Mesozoic, I do know what anyone who wants to reach out to young people should say: Billionaires took your money. They took your chance to buy a home. They took your chance at a good education. They stole your opportunities.
Billionaires took the things you want in life. If you really want those things, you have to take them back.
That's the message. That's the whole message. A successful JROTL should say that every day, not just to reach America's frustrated young white men, but people of every age, race and gender.
