Agnotology
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see agno bak
neglected, eclipsed by alr fact post truth?
merri ok
see expert-ise
see sci and academic suppression
related to echo/escalator?
see pundit? neo-con? "often wrong, never in doubt?"
related to nihilism?
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new sub-cat historical ignorance see troll caucus:
groaner israel slavery
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/josh-mandel-debate-remarks-slavery/
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an 9 26
Tuberville says he avoids reading to maintain his 'own opinion'
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AN 7 26
Everything that came before President Donald Trump is dumb, he thinks, according to journalist and author Fred Kaplan.
In a recent piece for *The iPaper*, Kaplan called out Trump's aversion to pre-history.
"The modern presidents before him were stupid (his vice president, JD Vance, quipped at the start of the bombing raid on Iran that the predecessors got stuck in Middle East wars because, unlike Trump, they were 'dumb') and expertise is a myth," wrote Kaplan.
He cited a few of Trump's statements on the matter, claiming “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” “Nobody knows more about trade than me,” “I know more about drones than anybody” and “My primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct about this stuff."
It has changed his second term from relying on experts to expelling them. For Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it means that many top military leaders who have dedicated their lives to service aren't being promoted. Secretary of State Marco Rubio fired 1,350 officials around the world. Trump still hasn't managed to get ambassadors to more than 100 embassies.
Trump's cuts have come closer to home, said Kaplan, with inexperienced national security staff now at the helm, cutting crucial jobs. Typically, the National Security Council staff writes position papers with other agency staff to take a whole-of-government approach on the matter.
"In most administrations, especially since the 1960s, this really is how national security policy is made. Sometimes it prolongs the process, to the frustration of some, but often, the complexity of the issues requires time and trouble," Kaplan explained. "Trump’s White House does none of this. He has cut the NSC staff by half and told the survivors that their task is not to bring him analysis or advice but rather to implement what he has decided to do. And when it comes to making foreign policy, there isn’t a Trump Administration in the usual sense of the term; there’s Trump and a handful of his cronies who parrot whatever he says – if they want to keep their jobs."
While the National Security Advisor is a full-time position, Rubio is serving in the role in addition to his own post as secretary of state. His deputy has no experience in national security, but he was the chief of staff to the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Kaplan noted that when Trump was making his decisions on Iran, the experts weren't brought together to discuss scenarios, optics or even options. It was the inner circle of people who was with him, wrote Maggie Habermann and Jonathan Swan in their new book Regime Change.
"Trump presented a highly optimistic scenario based on assurances by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had tried to persuade the previous three presidents to attack Iran," Kaplan wrote. "Trump said Netanyahu’s plan sounded good to him. End of discussion."
Now, after appointing an inexperienced acting director of national intelligence whose job was to "clean house," the stability of the U.S. national security apparatus is in question.
"It’s a good question whether a future president can rebuild the institutions and guardrails that might have impeded such a mindless epochal calamity," Kaplan closed. "But we can hope that successors learn at least one lesson from Trump’s repeated disasters – that those institutions and guardrails were put in place for a reason, and as much as the world has changed since then, the reason is still valid."
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AN 5 26
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls right-wing politics “deadly” — and predicts that “MAGA Will Kill Many Americans,” by the thousands, driven by greed and willful ignorance.
Krugman goes one step further, arguing outright that this is not by accident:
“Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes,” he writes.
He argues that the right’s decades-long opposition to health care is driven by greed, especially from “wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.”
Krugman points to Tuesday’s decision by Trump’s FDA to allow blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, which critics warn will increase use among the young.
Why?
“Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men,” Krugman writes — a constituency the president has been losing during his second term in office.
There’s also the recent decision, again by Trump’s FDA, to block the release of studies finding the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines safe, with side effects rare.
“Beyond this,” he continues, “right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic.”
Krugman also implicates greed in the anti-vaccine movement, saying that “quack medicine is big business.”
“Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated,” he writes.
Ideological willful ignorance plays a part as well — driven by the alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalism, the latter of which is “deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.”
To prove his point, Krugman points to the widely-reported resurgence of measles, that was seen as eliminated from the United States decades ago, thanks to vaccines. Now, many parents are choosing to forego vaccinating their children against this highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.
He adds to that the refusal of many red states to expand Medicaid, a program largely paid for by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act.
The data bear him out. Life expectancy in “Trump-leaning” states trails blue states significantly.
There’s “a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level,” Krugman writes. “Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.”
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OVERLAP COVID VAXXER, BIG LIE CLIMATE DENIAL?
Climate deniers in the 118th Congress, by the numbers
123
Total number of climate deniers in the 118th Congress
$52M
Total career contributions from the fossil fuel industry to climate deniers in the 118th Congress
90
Number of climate deniers who denied the results of the 2020 election
23%
Share of members in the 118th Congress who are climate deniers
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trump term 2 cong fail constantly says o know nothing bout thaT (EG cz CRYPTO PARDON)
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- Nikki McCann Ramirez @ Rolling Stone: Mike Johnson Wants You to Believe He Lives Under a Rock
Mike Johnson has a reflex. When asked about a major breaking news event that is dominating headlines and conversations around Capitol Hill’s proverbial water coolers — usually the president’s latest authoritarian endeavor or national humiliation — Johnson defaults to pretending he has no access to the internet, newspapers, or staff who are quite literally paid to keep him informed.
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AN 5 25
Salon Senior writer Amanda Marcotte says President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement adores a “bimbo."
“In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty,” Marcotte writes. “Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul.”
As example, Marcotte said look to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly proclaiming ignorance of the meaning behind habeas corpus. “‘Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to,’ Noem said through her unnervingly Botox-inflated lips.”
READ MORE:Republicans have 'no idea' what's coming: Dems delighted as they await budget backlash
Was Noem, who got a college degree through online courses, has taken the “role of the proud MAGA bimbo, in the grand tradition of figures like Sarah Palin," Marcotte writes. "The MAGA bimbo isn't just ignorant. She's contemptuous of people who actually know what they're talking about, especially if those facts-laden human beings are fellow women.”
Where the 20th-century version of the "bimbo" is a dim and mostly good-hearted woman, the MAGA movement makes the bimbo a nasty figure, “as cruel as she is dumb.” The modern right-wing man wants an attack dog, “someone who will charge in to fight your battles, unconstrained by intellectual concerns.”
“Ignorance is bliss,” said Marcotte, “at least for bigots.”
The origins of this bimbo devolution lies in reality TV like ‘The Apprentice,’ and ‘Real Housewives’, “where petty and cruel behavior is rewarded over human decency.”
READ MORE: 'Evil and depraved': Kristi Noem buried over 'embarrassing' social media post
Noem shapes herself around the stereotype of the wine-throwing real housewife, pairing “expensive clothes and plastic surgery with displays of breathtaking sadism, all performed as if she is literally too stupid to know better.”
“That's how we get pictures of Noem in full makeup with a $60,000 Rolex parading around in front of half-naked men in a torture prison, like she's a real-life "Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S." Or wearing various uniforms with full makeup and a blowout to conduct raids, earning the nickname 'ICE Barbie.'"
“The bimbo can only act on impulse, never information. In this MAGA narrative, it's liberals who are the meanies for asking more of a woman viewed as mentally incapable of handling it,” Marcotte wrote.
Read the full Salon analysis here.
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agno? fine if about AA?
04/18/25
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an 1 25
Five years ago, I wrote about how the politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and human beings.
That was January 2020.
Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. It’s only gotten so much worse.
For the remainder of 2020, we dealt with 385,676 deaths from the disease while then-President Trump lived in denial and misled the American people every day. He lied about its danger, how long it would last, treatments and prevention. He would bring in medical experts to speak during White House press conferences and then make stuff up himself out of nowhere and undermine everything that they said.
It was horrifying. People were dying and losing loved ones and the president was spewing an endless stream of strange nonsense, drivel, and dangerous misinformation. Many millions of people believed everything he said without question.
Then Trump lost the 2020 Election. He began lying about that too. Millions believed him again. Coward politicians rolled over for him. His lies exploded in the historic Jan. 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol.
As the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out to the public at-large in 2021, the anti-vaxxer movement went into overdrive. Currently vaccine hesitancy is near record highs, so the anti-vaxxer movement really made out, a grisly and telling cultural consequence of a pandemic that’s taken 1.2 million American lives.
Regardless, objectively, the covid vaccine was a man-made miracle. Plagues throughout history have lasted up to 20 years or more. We had a vaccine in 11 months thanks to the brilliance of scientific research and modern medicine. It was incredible. It was a tremendous accomplishment of humankind by every historical standard, and people threw the most outrageous temper tantrums over it.
It’s easy to get lost in modern comfort, but I wish more people would just take a few seconds sometimes to recognize that we live in extraordinary times. The fact that we get to take hot showers every day is a monumental luxury compared to the rest of human history.
That we can communicate across the globe instantaneously is anthropologically astounding, if you compare the last 30 years of human history to the 300,000 years before it.
Look around you right now, wherever you are: desks, tables, electronics, electricity, light bulbs, appliances, glassware, furniture, knick-knacks, artwork, paint, carpeting, buildings. All of those things require science, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, logistics, expertise. Experts. Smart people. Smart people gave us all of this.
Intelligence gave us every amazing thing that we see around us and take for granted. The collective education of humankind over millennia has brought us here.
A whole galaxy of humans and human know-how has come together to give us these wild luxuries of daily existence that make the vast majority of us wealthier in health and technology and everyday human comfort than the richest kings and queens and emperors of history.
And yet. We sneer at experts. We spit epithets like “academic elites” at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.
We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We worship spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence.
We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.
It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.
Speaking of which, five years later, Donald Trump is president again. He has pardoned the 1,500 rioters who sacked the United States Congress to try to overthrow the last election for him.
Trump also launched a broadside this week against America’s scientific, academic, and medical research efforts, pullingthe U.S. out of the World Health Organization and hitting the National Institutes for Health with with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications.
Trump’s cancellation of NIH grant review panels, as Forbes reports, includes the $7.1 billion annual budget for the National Cancer Institute: “of which more than $3 billion a year is allocated directly towards research for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer, which causes over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. every year.” The NCI supports 72 different cancer centers.
Freezing national funding for cancer research is sadistic.
It could also be devastating to America’s institutions of higher education.
In Ohio, Republican politicians are piling on. This week they reintroduced a proposal to overhaul education at our colleges and universities.
They seek to install a culture of fear and paranoia over subject matter among Ohio faculty, threatening their livelihoods and banning their ability to strike. They also seek to ban any diversity efforts on campuses as well as any diversity courses.
The bill’s clear intent is to having a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression in Ohio’s institutions of higher learning, both explicit and implicit, which is an atrocious insult to the entire purpose of education and all of the ideas behind open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.
Ohio higher education currently ranks No. 39 in America. Apparently that’s not bad enough for them.
America’s love affair with confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need paid. The damage will be extensive.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.
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DN 1 25 digiTal authoritarian req EARTH2 ECHO
trump does not read, has little factual info, but constantly says he is smarter /better than experts like generals
musk blew up budget bill b/c does not get process
an 1 25
Historian: Trump’s 'us v. them' response to LA wildfires shows inability to handle 'moments of crisis'
IT HAS TO BE FAult of dem, vs agw
//
an 1 25
President-elect Donald Trump took his complaints about the wildfire disaster in California to a new level on Thursday, with a Truth Social post baselessly suggesting that Gov. Gavin Newsom was withholding water firefighters could be using to protect homes and businesses.
"Governor Gavin Newscum should immediately go to Northern California and open up the water main, and let the water flow into his dry, starving, burning State, instead of having it go out into the Pacific Ocean," Trump said. "It ought to be done right now, NO MORE EXCUSES FROM THIS INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR. IT’S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE!"
Trump has repeatedly claimed that California officials are somehow blocking firefighters from accessing water — which appears to be a confused misinterpretation of long-running political battles in the state over how to allocate water between agricultural, commercial, residential and environmental use.
He made similar accusations in 2018 about water being denied to firefighters during an aggressive fire season in Northern California, prompting the state fire agency to issue a statement clarifying this is not true.
Firefighters have struggled to maintain water pressure as they have tried to save neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades Experts say it's because aging water infrastructure in Los Angeles is being overstressed by the sudden spike in demand, depleting tanks faster than they can be refilled.
In previous fire disasters, Trump has also accused California officials of failing to properly manage forests, at one point suggesting they should have raked leaves to prevent wildfires, like Finland does — a remark that led to widespread mockery from Finns on social media.
He made similar claims about the latest fire disaster, which forced a reporter on Fox News to point out that forest management was irrelevant given that the fire in Malibu began in a residential area.
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three phases: 1) ridicule RR quayle, had to pretend to be smart 2 acceptance palin? dubya 3) celebration MTG djt arrogance plus ignorance good ol boys foghorn
nyt no lnx
Ignoramuses Are Gaining Ground, Andy Borowitz Warns
In his new book, the satirist and comedian traces the rise of ill-equipped politicians and considers how to thwart them.
By Elisabeth Egan
Oct. 6, 2022
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an 6 24
alternet-NO LNX
Republicans are playing a dangerous game by weaponizing ignorance
Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryJune 15, 2024
Donald Trump’s felony convictions are fueling another disinformation campaign, this one equal in destructive force to his Big Lie. Orchestrating a unified response reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Trump acolytes are weaving Trump’s criminality into a false indictment of the American legal system.
Republicans are falsely blaming Joe Biden for outcomes over which a sitting U.S. president has no control: convictions of Trump on 34 felony counts, pursued by an independently elected DA, pursuant to a state criminal code, as determined by 12 independent jurors, selected with the help of Trump’s own trial team.
The GOP’s target? Low-information voters.
Their weapon? Blatant disinformation.
Their allies? Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine.
Their illiberal objective tracks the geopolitical strategies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and strongman dictators adversarial to democratic systems in general: Weakening institutions through chaos that exhausts voters, allowing oligarch-backed extremists to seize power, peacefully or otherwise, amid the mayhem.
Feigned outrage to entertain the masses
The performative outrage in this week’s program includes eight Republican senators vowing retaliation for Trump’s convictions by opposing any legislation authored by Democrats; they also promise to withhold Senate confirmations.
Meanwhile, Johnson revealed his “three-pronged approach” to retaliation, including withholding congressional appropriations for the Department of Justice. Declaring that Republicans would “do everything we can” to exact revenge for Trump, Johnson and his Republican colleagues are currently pursuing legislation that would allow Trump to pardon himself of state crimes if he retakes the presidency.
Johnson has also suggested the "Trump-ed up" Supreme Court would “step in” to overturn Trump’s state convictions, the irony of simultaneously claiming that Biden controls the judiciary apparently over his head.
Advocating illegal acts is itself illegal.
Trump strategists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — the latter headed to prison soon himself — are openly urging Republican officeholders to use their offices to attack Democrats. They clearly need reminding — almost as much as they need fast, effective counsel — that using public resources for partisan purposes violates federal law.
Demanding that Republican district attorneys open investigations into Democrats, they urge attorneys general in Republican-controlled states to target Democrats for unspecified crimes.
Jeff Clark, the former Trump Justice Department official indicted in the Georgia election case, has broadened the call, urging “brave” district attorneys in conservative areas to file lawsuits in federal court against anyone involved in criminal cases against Trump.
Openly advocating illegal acts, and doing so in writing no less, suggests these fools have themselves for clients.
Republicans’ gaslighting campaign is reckless
Trump, for his part, is priming Fox News viewers for violence in the event he is sentenced to serve time in prison, saying, "I'm not sure the public would stand for (my potential prison sentence) ... You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point."
The right’s gaslighting-of-the-uninformed campaign is working, as evidenced by online demands for bloody revenge. In trying to dox the jurors in Trump’s Manhattan hush money case, one of Trump’s supporters posted, “Hang everyone. 1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That's the only solution.”
A Proud Boys writer chimed in, “Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun.”
Without considering what comes next when the rule of law is hobbled — paramilitary hillbillies rounding up foreigners come to mind, as do drug cartels dropping roadside bombs from drones — Republicans are defending Trump by viciously attacking the judge, jurors, prosecutor, evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, the attorney general, the Department of Justice and mainstream media; they have also threatened to end the career of any GOP candidate who dares to voice respect for the American legal system.
So much for “law and order.”
Like a man blaming his wife as he kicks her down the stairs, Trump tells anyone who will listen — which apparently includes most media outlets — that Democrats have “forced” him to “take revenge” against government adversaries. Salivating over the possibility that he will finally get to imprison his political foes, brandishing his prison shiv, Trump told Newsmax, “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them…”
One is almost tempted to have compassion for Melania.
From whence does the GOP’s amnesia come?
Republican outrage is overplayed, as if everyone has forgotten about Trump’s well-documented criminality, played out over decades.
In 1998, the Treasury Department imposed the then-largest fine of $477,000 on Trump Taj Mahal casino for money laundering; Trump admitted that he pocketed millions of dollars raised from charity; he was ordered to pay $2 million for diverting donations from a televised fundraiser for veterans; in 2023, a civil jury adjudicated him a rapist; he was previously found to have engaged in business fraud to the tune of $354 million dollars.
When his niece Mary Trump sued him for allegedly defrauding her out of tens of millions of dollars — she said Trump extorted her by threatening to withhold medical coverage from a severely disabled nephew — she declared “Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.”
Despite his consistent criminality and organized crime connections, Trump’s felony convictions hit differently, triggering the GOP’s kamikaze declaration of war as three more criminal trials and 54 combined felony counts loom.
Democrats must punch back harder
Republicans are using disinformation as a weapon against uninformed voters to keep them aligned with Trump. Their ploy seems to be working, as Trump informally reported a $52.8 million haul in online donations in the first 24 hours after the verdict was announced.
Instead of confessing to the obvious that Trump’s criminality is driving his legal woes — not Biden, not the “Deep State,” not rigged justice — MAGA Republicans would prefer to round up Trump’s adversaries as political prisoners.
After Trump’s deadly mob wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence to block Trump’s 2020 loss, they are lusting for another fight; historically, coups are regularly attempted more than once.
It is clear that the United States is under siege by illiberal forces, aided by a relentless propaganda machine committed to fomenting violence. My money is on the justice system — and on voters being smart enough to detect the ruse.
The politically moderate sports announcer Colin Cowherd recently summed it up: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you… Trump’s campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons… It’s a cabal of convicts.”
Here's to slapping back.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
Lauren Boebert says liberals want Earth Day to be about climate change 'to divide us' ›
Send the GOP 'back to elementary school': Dem rep suggests 'stupid' colleagues 'stay in their lanes' ›
Conservative faux-outrage over Kyrsten Sinema’s thigh-high boots is just the latest in GOP culture war stupidity ›
It's science: Trump voters are dumb - Alternet.org ›
'Stupid, ridiculous self-righteous crap': Iowa grandma scorches Republicans’ six-week abortion ban ›
GOP senators slam House Republicans for 'ridiculous' antics at Trump hush money trial ›
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:{an 5 24
recent polls suggest half the country may vote against their own self-interests in November.
The self sabotage is head-turning: Christians who defend Donald Trump’s debauchery, poor people who give their money to a billionaire with rotating Ponzi schemes, pensioners who don’t understand that tax cuts for the 1 percent threaten their own entitlements.
ALSO READ:How Trump could run for president from jail
As the new Time Magazine interview made clear, Trump has done nothing for the common man and everything for his wealthy donors. Yet somehow, in the MAGAverse, that fact doesn’t seem to compute.
To misquote Jesus, the stupid will always be among us.
But stupid seems to be spreading in the U.S., and data suggest that excessive sensory stimulation may be the cause.
Our politics reflect a cognitive decline
When Trump celebrated his 2016 election win, his declaration, “I love the poorly educated” made headlines. Nearly eight years on, it’s not that half the country supports violent coup attempts, it’s that half the country sincerely believes the 2020 election was stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The United States seems to be slumbering toward Idiocracy, a funny-not-funny satire about Americans in the year 2500. Instead of possessing superior intellect, they have lost the ability to think. In the movie, Americans elect as president a dimwitted pro-wrestler — President Camacho — because he is loud and manipulative and they don’t know any better. The Trump sequel writes itself.
Amusing as that movie was, America’s declining cognition is serious. Americans’ logic, language and reading comprehension levels have fallen measurably. Last year, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Oregon reported that, while Americans’ IQs increased dramatically over the past century, their cognitive abilities showed measurable decline between 2006 and 2018. Scores in three of four broad domains of intelligence fell during that period: logic, vocabulary and visual/mathematical problem-solving.
Excessive use of personal electronics, social media
In 1850, unwashed kids aged 6 to 18 were crammed into smelly one-room schoolhouses with no electricity or technology — and often no books. Yet despite their primitive educational settings, most still emerged well-versed in Latin, French, humanities and trigonometry.
Today, with whiteboards, laptops, separate rooms for each grade and teacher/student ratios at historical lows, student comprehension levels are falling instead of rising. Last year, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for 13 year-olds hit their lowest scores in decades, which isn’t explained by the COVID-19 gap of recent years.
The explanation may be found in a growing reliance on smartphones, social media and electronic devices that offer addictive and excessive visual and audio stimulation, dulling the brain’s ability to think critically and organically.
Observational studies in human learning have shown a direct link between a child’s exposure to fast-paced television in the first three years of life and his subsequent attentional deficits as he gets older. Excessive sensory stimulation (ESS) during childhood has been shown to increase cognitive and behavioral deficits overall. Even rising levels of ADHD among older children and college students are correlated with subjects’ early exposure to excessive electronic media.
Educators are taking cellphones out of the classroom
Educators are paying attention. This year, dozens of schools across the country have taken steps to remove cellphones from the classroom.
Although three-quarters of U.S. schools already disallow cellphone use in the classroom, it’s up to individual teachers to enforce, which results in high variability among schools and classrooms. Unruly and disruptive students who need instruction the most may be getting it the least as exhausted teachers pacify them with their cellphones to keep them quiet and in their seats so others may learn.
Congress is catching on, too. Bipartisan concern is growing over how cellphones and social media may be harming children. With about a third of U.S. teens reporting that they are on social media “almost constantly,” the U.S. surgeon general recently issued a warning about social media and mental health. It is clear that more studies on the relationship between ESS and both mental and cognitive health are needed.
Oddly enough, Congress may actually do something about it. In November, lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill to study how cellphones affect mental health and cognitive development. The Focus on Learning Act, presently in committee, would require the U.S. Department of Education to complete a study on the effects of cellphone use in K-12 classrooms, both on students’ mental health and their academic performance.
Over-stimulation, overall, reduces our ability to think
It seems logical that over-stimulating the human brain with loud colors and noises would, over time, reduce our capacity for nuanced and critical thinking. Just as over-reliance on crutches can cause leg muscles to atrophy, over-exposure to electronics and addictive but thoughtless social media can atrophy the learning centers of the brain.
Smartphones aren’t the only culprit. Recent studies have also shown that high levels of noise, including exposure to high-decibel music at home or in the car, and loud, omnipresent television, also leads to cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in the brain.
It’s been reported that 100 million people are exposed to dangerous environmental noise due to traffic, personal listening devices and other sources. Noise pollution has emerged as a risk factor for depression, cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative disorders of the central nervous system leading to cognitive and memory defects.
It seems the entire nation could use a long walk in the woods, or an extended visit to one of our 429 national park sites — sans devices.
Education levels are affecting U.S. politics
America’s growing political divide may have more to do with education and cognition levels than policy differences. By wide margins, the mostly highly educated congressional districts in the United States elect Democrats, while the least educated districts elect Republicans.
According to data compiled by Politico, Democrats control 77% of the most highly educated congressional districts, while Republicans control 64% of the least educated districts. The rural poor love Trump, even though Democrats deliver kitchen table results that benefit them most: jobs, infrastructure, broadband, healthcare, and industry regulations so trains don’t derail and parts don’t fly off aircraft at 16,000 feet.
Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, was known for his attacks on the monarchy and his advocacy of democratic reforms. He famously wrote, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
Even though Trump’s closest advisers widely regard him as an idiot, he has a preternatural skill: manipulating ignorance.
Call it a conman’s intuition.
*Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. HerSubstack,The Haake,is free.
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an 1 24
a poll released prior to the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection found that one in four Americans believe that the FBI "organized and encouraged" the deadly attack on the US Capitol. However, a former federal prosecutor thinks the rest of America should be "grateful" that only 25% subscribe to that conspiracy theory.
In a recent column for Lawfare, former US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg put that poll in perspective. He pointed out that while it's true that one in four Americans believe the "nonsense" claim that the federal law enforcement was behind the US Capitol siege that killed five police officers and injured hundreds more, that the poll is less "depressing" when put in the context of other polls regarding information a large majority of Americans view as settled facts.
Rosenberg laid out how, in a March 2021 survey, 15% of Americans believe that "the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation," which is a core element of the QAnon conspiracy theory that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) has endorsed.
"Americans apparently relish conspiracy theories. That is neither good nor new. But even if we turn to the physical sciences—the stuff we ostensibly learned in school—we do not do all that much better as a nation," Rosenberg wrote.
He then pointed out numerous other survey results that show a not-insignificant amount of Americans are effectively scientifically illiterate. Almost 30% of Americans, for example, didn't know that the Earth takes 365 days to orbit the sun according to a 2021 query by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. A 2018 survey by the National Science Foundation found that 28% of Americans actually believe the sun orbits the Earth (a theory debunked by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei debunked in the 17th century).
Roughly that same percentage of the country also fails in basic civics knowledge. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found in 2022 that approximately one in four Americans could not name a single right guaranteed by the First Amendment. 25% of Americans were also unable to name any of the three branches of government, according to Annenberg. And in 2018, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars found that afull two-thirds of Americans would fail the US citizenship test, which asks basic questions about US history and the nature of the US government.
"When you step back and look at what we 'know' as Americans and what we do not know, this number — alarming as it may be — is not surprising. Indeed, it coincides with other data," Rosenberg wrote. "Perhaps we should be grateful that it is only 25 percent."
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aha-let: // conspiracy theory all gop BS commentary/ "analysis" reduces human actions/motivations to desire for greed [rubber-glue inverse kochs] or fame (or nowpower/control pop psych truism] // gubmint /commies/ soros
eg
morano control BS?
Fox News is returning to its pro-COVID-19 stance by attacking Los Angeles, California, for considering an indoor mask mandate as infections in the county skyrocket. The right-wing propaganda channel, which has long spewed pandemic-related misinformation, is again lying about the efficacy of masks for slowing the spread of the disease.
The Los Angeles Times reported that LA County’s case rate “has been increasing since late October and is now triple what it was in the autumn low,” and is currently 188 weekly cases per 100,000 residents, with a case rate of 100 or more being considered high. The LA Times also reported that the county is suffering about 60 deaths from COVID-19 each week. According to City News Service, the county’s COVID-19 hospitalization rate already exceeds one of the two thresholds that County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said would trigger a universal indoor masking mandate.
Fox’s response to this news is to return to its history of killing its viewers by spreading medical misinformation that has contributed to the staggering national COVID-19 death toll exceeding 1 million people. In particular, Fox has spread lies about the usefulness of face masks in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Some Fox personalities have bizarrely claimed that wearing masks makes people crazy, while others simply told lies about their effectiveness. Fox as a whole worked very hard to incorporate masking into their deranged culture war, even though at least one Fox prime time host early in the pandemic repeatedly gushed about their potential in keeping people safe. (Fox also for a time required staffers to wear masks at the workplace.) Besides attacking face masks during a respiratory disease pandemic, Fox has also urged its viewers to distrust public health officials.
And with the possibility of a mask mandate coming back to LA, Fox personalities reacted with incredulity, pretending that masking is ineffective and attacking the county public health director as “power hungry.”
- Fox & Friends First co-host Todd Piro asked, “Have we learned no lessons from the … failure of masks?” He added, “These people, Barbara Ferrer, that you saw there, the entireestablishmentthat is pushing more masking, more lockdowns, they are power hungry. And they refuse to acknowledge that COVID is something we cannot prevent at this point, but something we have to deal with.”
- Fox & Friends co-host:{ Brian Kilmeade said: “Masks don’t work. … What is wrong with these people?”}:
- Later in the program, Kilmeade portrayed a masking mandate as intentional sabotage on people’s lives and children’s schooling, saying: “The problem is too many people enjoying their lives going back to normal. Let's try to screw them up again.”
- Fox’s America’s Newsroom interviewed **Fox contributor Caitlyn Jenner for her inexpert opinion on the efficacy of face masks. During the interview, Jenner said: “I don’t think they work very well.” She later added: “I think our public health director is kind of like a little mini [NIAID Director Dr. Anthony] Fauci, wanting the controlthat they have.”
- Fox Business host Steve Hilton claimed that masks “make practically no differencein the preventing of the transmission of this virus,” then ranted: “Can you believe we're back here again, yet again? You have these lunatics, these bureaucrats, totally unaccountable – Barbara Ferrer, the half a million dollar a year woman who runs public health in Los Angeles – not a medical doctor, parading these totally bogus metrics, right, about cases and whatever. How does she know what the cases are? People are testing on their own at home privately. It's not reported. It's complete BS. The whole thing is total BS, and I hope nobody pays any attention to it at all.”
- On Twitter, Hilton also urged LA residents to “rise up and say enough is enough.”
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aha vax everywhere = neg?
no lnx
Black flag:Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol
Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021
It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.
Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."
Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.
On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.
In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:
It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...
Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.
According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.
It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.
Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...
So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this
Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.
Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.
An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.
The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...
Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.
They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.
However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)
Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.
And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.
In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:
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It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.
During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."
Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.
During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:
I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….
"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.
As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."
Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.
Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/neuroscience-facts/
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esquire 2005 pierce bk
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Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It’s not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it “common sense.” The president’s former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the “yuck factor.” The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.
It’s a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, “faith-based,” a cheap huckster’s phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It’s a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.
After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it’s a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.
Hofstadter saw this one coming. “Intellect is pitted against feeling,” he wrote, “on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical.” The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the “intelligent design” movement contained this remarkable sentence: “They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.”
A “politically savvy challenge to evolution” is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn’t matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn’t matter how many votes your candidate got, he’s not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of The New York Times.
Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live, in which Larry asked the following question:
“All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”
And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?
This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong.And the poor biologist’s words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ’s Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and, therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but his Gut’s the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool....
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bk notes;
trans tx cirridor --> naFTA SUPERHIGHway ~ corsi, lou dobbs,
RR said he lib death camps ns brown derby; 6/2007 gallup poll 68% gop not believe evol; tucker said god made all;
knights templar pope clement V, mant fled to scotland Bannockburn Robt the bruce p 69
Freemasons ceens as connected to Illuminati in early am? 85 blamd for jacobin excess;
blamed for 917 russ revo JBS saw as --> one wrld gov't;
1827 ~ mason ctx: class and rural vs city post Erie Canal changes; Weed and Wm Seward (AJackson) got JQ Adams out of retire? 88 1835 seward jumps to Whigs; whigs implode --> republ;
@007 Jon Chait bk Big Con voodoo econ;
new mwdi conf 1995 gave liddy award;
Fainess doct, media consol; stats; --> talk radio 3Premises in action;
andrew cline prof Wa U st Lou 4 rules fir pundits: never be dull; embracve willfully ignorant stupidity 3 am pub;i is stupid, treat that way; 4 ignore facts and publi record when conventient 104
cline: TV is emotional (does no do rason well); hu are story-tellers 105
Fox built on TR fdn; "as edgy as you can get w/ kids on the car"
RUSH "potrent narcotic of reassuring simplicity" psych Paul Ginnetty 109
Hannity 110- Hann and RWR destroyed post 911 unity 114
hist WLAC nashville --> satellite alll pgm from HQ
Micahel Savage nee wisner p 122- autism a racket; gets award intro by Colmes
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in trans, rove : just get me a fucking faith-baws thing Kuo
ID dover sch bd; aguillard decision
Darwin read Wm paley on HMS B Natural Theology; pioneer textbook? Th More fdn dom pizza $; test case scotus; scvalia est clause? Judge joens andreww nap on O'reilly, phyliss s; Coulter Godless bk pro ID; Ben SteinL: Expelled, fo intell allowed: Darwin --> Nazis; god--> empathy, sc- --> kill ppl p157;
Terri Sciavo 2003 jeb bush gov terri';s law; CJR ~ covrge; emotion/gut; hannity coach guests to ~ Miachael S; Housr subpoen'd comatose terrI? 187 Savage cvalled dems "soulless ghou;s"
Judicval war on faith called take out food tube "act of terror" in plain sight by gov't;
AGW ch: p 200-
12/07 inhif 400 sci
M Crichton state of fear eco-terror use climate hoax to take over world 210
cf chris Mooney on 1995 newt ~ IPCC rept;
1952 Readr's Digest reprint Chirtian Herald art on cancer by the varton" --> JH Hill & K response; tob CEO mtg NYC 12/53: as long as doubt, not proven;biologist Clarence Cook Little quit U Mich after decry low morals while diddling coed; heriditarin evol --> eugenices 30's; all disease genetic; he was orig of doubt strat?
2002 Luntz memo; "sound sci" debate closing but not yet closed; "conservationsts"; gut vs liberal or elitist 206
2/18/04 62 sci ~ Bush 43 admin
stem cell
july 20 2006 Th Karl NOaA ~ CEQ edits; muzzle hansen; conney edits 214; James Speth
2004 arctic impaCT REPORT attacked by CTT fuded by exxon, cited by inhofe;
war on teror: wolfie picked iran nukes b/c easist story to sell 224;
Hofstader quote: The case ~ intellect is founded...
Imp Life in Amerld City about iraq occupy; applicants asked about Roe; anthony zinni;
reality TV
palin at conv said lack of qual are best qualifications;
in promary debate? 3 gops cands said do not bel evol;
jane m NYer: am want war on teror fought by jck bauer, patrriot; West Pt prof said made his job harder 24 show; co-creator joel Surnow gurst (honor0 at party at Rush house hosted by clatrence; heritage pane; michael chertoff; lunch WH rve ad wife/dtr of cheney; Yoo cites; 2007 Scalia ays jury will not convict JB for saving la 272; gav GITMO guards ideas; wsj says rating of 24 and b43 //; torture --? litmuis test for judge?! 275 Palin says BO wants to read Terr their rights;
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xian provides basis for no fact/info/expert?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/heres-how-christian-nationalism-in-the-us-legislates-evil-and-punishes-the-poor/
On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, "Let's fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let's fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire." In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament's Book of Hebrews: "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross."
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
There's nothing new, of course, about an American politician melding religion and politics on the campaign trail. Still, Pence's decision to replace Jesus with the Stars and Stripes raised eyebrows across a range of religious and political persuasions. Indeed, the melding of Old Glory and Christ provided the latest evidence of the rising influence of Christian nationalism in the age of Trump.
It's no longer hard to find evidence of just how deeply Christian nationalism influences our politics and policymaking. During the pandemic, the Bible has repeatedly been used (and distorted) to justify Covid-19 denialism and government inaction, not to speak of outright repression. In late March, as cities were locking down and public health officials were recommending strict quarantine measures, one of Donald Trump's first acts was to gather his followers at the White House for what was billed as a "National Day of Prayer" to give Americans the strength to press on through death and difficulty.
Later in the spring, protests against pandemic shutdowns, funded with dark money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, demanded that states reopen for business and social distancing guidelines be loosened. (Forget about masking of any sort.) At them, printed protest signs said things like: "Even Pharaoh Freed Slaves in a Plague" and "Texas will not take the Mark of the Beast." And even as faith communities struggled admirably to adjust tozoom worship services, as well as remote pastoral care and memorials, President Trump continued to fan the flames of religious division, declaring in-person worship "essential," no matter that legal experts questioned his authority to do so.
And speaking of his version of Christian nationalism, no one should forget the June spectacle in Lafayette Square near the White House, when Trump had racial-justice protestors tear-gassed so he could stroll to nearby St. John's Church and pose proudly on its steps displaying a borrowed bible. Though he flashed it to the photographers, who can doubt how little time he's spent within its pages. (Selling those same pages is another matter entirely. After all, a Bible he signed in the wake of that Lafayette Square event is now on sale for nearly $40,000.)
The Battle for the Bible in American History
To understand how power is wielded in America by wealthy politicians and their coteries of extremists in 2020, you have to consider the role of religion in our national life. An epic battle for the Bible is now underway in a country that has been largely ceded to white evangelical Christian nationalists. Through a well-funded network of churches and nonprofits, universities, and think tanks, and with direct lines to the nation's highest political officials, they've had carte-blanche to set the terms of what passes for religious debate in this country and dictate what morality even means in our society.
Under Trump, such religious nationalism has reached a fever pitch as a reactionary movement that includes technocratic billionaires, televangelists, and armed militias has taken root with asimple enough message: God loves white Christian America, favors small government and big business, and rewards individualism and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the poor, people of color, and immigrants are blamed for society's problemseven as the rich get richer in what's still the wealthiest country in the history of the world.
The dangers posed by today's Christian nationalists are all too real, but the battle for the Bible itself is not new in America. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul's epistles to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They also ripped the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached a "prosperity gospel" that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism.
Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubberstamp Jim Crow practices, while in the late 1970s the Moral Majority helped to mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists into national politics. In my own youth, I remember politicians quoting Thessalonians in the lead up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as proof that God believes in work-requirements for public assistance programs.
Students of religion and history know that, although such theological battles have often tipped disastrously toward the forces of violence, deprivation, and hate, Christian religious thinking has also been a key ingredient in positive social change in this country. Escaped slave Harriet "Moses" Tubman understood the Underground Railroad as a Christian project of liberation, while escaped slave Frederick Douglass fought for abolition through churches across the north in the pre-Civil War years. A century later, near the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained how, to achieve his universal dream of justice, a beloved community of God would be built through a "freedom church of the poor."
After all, in every chapter of American history, abolitionists, workers, labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and other representatives of the oppressed have struggled for a better nation not just in streets and workplaces, but in the pulpit, too. In the wreckage of the present Trumpian moment, with a fascistic, white nationalism increasingly ascendant, people of conscience would do well to follow suit.
The "Psychological Bird" of Bad Religion
In my book Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, I focus on a reality that has long preoccupied me: how, in this country, the Bible has so often been manipulated to obscure its potentially emancipatory power; in particular, the way in which what theologian Jim Wallis has called themost famous biblical passage on the poor (from the Gospel of Matthew) -- "the poor will be always with us" -- has been misused.
Since I was a young girl, scarcely a week has passed in which I haven't heard someone quoting Matthew as an explanation for why poverty is eternal and its mitigation reserved at best for charity or philanthropy (but certainly not for government). The logic of such thinking runs through so many of our religious institutions including what's now known as "evangelical Christianity," but also our legislatures, courts, military, schools, and more. It hasn't just shaped the minds of young Christians but has helped to spiritualize (and cement in place) poverty, while implicitly oreven explicitly justifying ever greater inequality in this society.
Today, the idea that poverty is the result of bad behavior, laziness, or sin rather than decisions made by those with power is distinctly ascendant in Donald Trump's and Mitch McConnell's Washington. Biblical passages like that one in Matthew have become another ideological tool brandished by reactionaries and the wealthy to deflect attention from this country's systemic failures.
Consider, for example, the historic development of what's often known as the "Bible Belt" (or alternatively the "Poverty Belt"). It sweeps across the South, from North Carolina to Mississippi, Tennessee to Alabama, home to poor people of every race. It represents the deepest, most contiguous area of poverty in the United States made possible in part by heretical theology, biblical misinterpretation, and Christian nationalism.
The convergence of poverty and religion in the Bible Belt has a long history, stretching back to the earliest settler-colonists in the slave era. It echoed through the system of Jim Crow that had the region in its grip until the Civil Rights years and the modern political concept of "the solid South" (once Democratic, now Republican). Within its bounds lies a brutal legacy of divide and conquer that, to this day, politicizes the Bible by claiming that poverty results from sins against God and teaches poor white people in particular that, although they may themselves have little or nothing, they are at least "better" than people of color.
At the end of the bloody march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, Martin Luther King explained the age-old politics of division in the region this way:
"If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow... And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man... And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion."
That "psychological bird" was seasoned and cooked in a volatile mix of racist pseudo-science, economic orthodoxy, and bad religion. In fact, it retained its enormous power in large part by using the Bible and a version of Christianity to validate plunder and human suffering on a staggering scale. De jure Jim Crow may no longer exist, but its history haunts America to this day, and the Bible continues to be weaponized to validate anti-poor, white racist political power.
As jobs and opportunity continue to vanish in twenty-first-century America and churches stand among the last truly functional institutions in many communities, the Bible, however interpreted, still influences daily life for millions. How it's understood and preached affects the political and moral direction of the country. Consider that those Bible Belt states -- where Christian nationalism (which regularly displays its own upside-down version of the Bible) now reigns supreme -- account for more than 193 electoral college votes and so will play a key role in determining the fate of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in November.
I had my own experience with that version of biblical and theological interpretation and its growing role in our national politics in June 2019 during a hearing of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives. Its subject was poverty in America and the economic realities of struggling families.A racially and geographically diverse group of leaders of the Poor People's Campaign (of which I'm the co-chair) were invited to testify on those realities. Alongside us that day were two Black pastors invited by Republican congressmen to stand as examples of how faith and hard work is the only recipe for a good and stable life for the impoverished.
We had come to present what we've called the Poor People's Moral Budget, a study showing that the United States does have the money to end poverty, hunger, homelessness, and more, just not the political will to do so. In response, members of the committee turned to the same tired stereotypes about why so many of us in such a wealthy country are poor. Some cited thesupposed failure of the 1960s War on Poverty as evidence that programs of social uplift just don't work, while ignoring the dramatic way politicians had undercut those initiatives in the years that followed.Like those pastors, others replied with tales of their own success rising out of economic hardship via bootstrap individualism and they plugged Christian charity as the way to alleviate poverty. I listened to them all as they essentially promoted a heretical theology that claimed people suffer from poverty largely because they're estranged from God and lack a deep enough faith in Jesus.
That day, the walls of that House committee room rang with empty words twisting what the Bible actually says about the poor. One Republican representative typically remarked that,although he was familiar with the Bible, he had never found anyplace in it "where Jesus tells Caesar to care for the poor." Another all-too-typically suggested that Christian charity, not government-sponsored programs, is the key to alleviating poverty.
Someone less familiar with the arguments of such politicians might have been surprised to hear so many of them seeking theological cover. As a biblical scholar and a student of the history of social movements, I know well how religious texts actually instruct us to care for the poor and dispossessed. As a long-time organizer, I've learned that those in power now regularly, even desperately, seek to abuse and distort the liberating potential of our religious traditions.
Indeed, in response to that representative, Reverand William Barber, my Poor People's Campaign co-chair, and I pointed out how interesting it was that he identified himself with Caesar (not necessarily the most flattering comparison imaginable, especially as biblical Christianity polemicizes against Caesar and the Roman empire). Then I detailed for him many of the passages and commandments in the Bible that urge us to organize society around the needs of the poor, forgive debts, pay workers a living wage, rather than favoring either the rich or "Caesar." That, of course, is indeed the formula of the Trump era (where, in the last six pandemic months, the 643 wealthiest Americans raked in an extra $845 billion, raising their combined wealth by 29%). I also pointed out that the most effective poverty-reduction programs like Head Start are federally funded, neither philanthropic nor a matter of Christian charity.
Good News from the Poor
In the Poor People's Campaign, we often start our organizing meetings by showing a series of color-coded mapsof the country. The first has the states that have passed voter suppression laws since 2013; the next, those with the highest poverty rates; then, those that have not expanded Medicaid but have passed anti-LGBTQ laws. And so it goes. Our final map displays the states densest with self-identified evangelical Protestants.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that those maps overlap almost perfectly, chiefly in the Bible Belt, but also in the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic states, and even in parts of the Northeast and West. The point is to show how inextricably connected the battle for voting rights, healthcare, and other critical resources is to the battle for the Bible.The stakes are measured in the health of the entire nation, because the same politicians who manipulate the Bible and the right to vote to win elections then pass immoral budgets and policies.
When Vice President Pence altered that line from the Book of Hebrews, he was charging headfirst onto that very blood-soaked battlefield with a desecrated Bible in hand. The question is: why should he and other Christian nationalists have the power to define Christianity? If they are so intent on "fixing their eyes on Old Glory," shouldn't they also fix their eyes on what Jesus actually said?
The Greek word evangelia, out of which "evangelical" comes, means bringing good news to those made poor by systems of exploitation. The Bible's good news, also defined as gospel, talks again and again about captives being freed, slaves released, and all who are oppressed being taken care of. It's said that were you to cut out every one of its pages that mentions poverty, the Bible would fall apart. And when you actually read the words on those pages, you see that the gospel doesn't talk about the inevitability of poverty or the need for charity, but the responsibilities of the ruling authorities to all people and the possibility of abundance for all.
At a time when 43.5% of Americans are poor or one fire, storm, health-care crisis, pandemic, eviction, or job loss from poverty, it couldn't be more important for Americans to begin to reckon with this reality and our moral obligation to end it. Instead, politicians pass voter suppression laws, kick kids off food programs, and allow the poisoning of our water, air, and land, while Christian nationalist religious leaders bless such policies and cherry-pick biblical verses to justify them as all-American. Consider such a reality not simply a matter of a religious but a political, economic, and moral crisis that, in the midst of a pandemic, is pushing this country ever closer to the brink of spiritual death.
If America is still worth saving, this is no longer a battle anyone should sit out.
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David Atkins / Washington Monthly August 16, 2020
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/why-the-gop-cant-control-qanon-the-party-was-already-becoming-a-conspiracy-cult/
at long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.
I (as others have) use the word “cult” here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q” who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration withtop “Q” level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops” from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars” and “clocks.”
The key catchphrases of the movement are typical of cultic in-groups with political overtones. “Trust the Plan.” “Patriots Are in Control.” “Where We Go One We Go All.” It provides a built-in community of fellow believers, and a chiliastic all-encompassing spiritual battle against both human and supernatural enemies. As with an adventist cult, Q followers are supposed to beessential team members laying the groundwork for the exposure of the “truth”: a giant global ring of child-eating Satanist pedophiles restricting access tofree energy, debt jubileesand world peace.
Central to all of this is the figure of Donald Trump, who will supposedly one day bring “the pain”: the mass arrest and summary execution of all the cult’s enemies, ranging from standard right-wing targets like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. (The fact that President Trump, leader of the Executive Branch of the United States, has supposedly allowed this ring to exist unhampered for nearly four years while an anonymous 8chan user spreads the gospel is dismissed as a minor inconvenience.) All of it is overlaid on existing white supremacist and anti-semitic themes, as the enemy is supposed to be a “globalist” cabal using minorities to overwhelm majority-white Christian nations.
QAnon followers are also suffering the same sorts of social isolation and estrangement from family and friends that is typical of new cult members. QAnon leaders, for their part, offer a substitute family for them in replacement. As QAnon influencer Martin Geddes once tweeted before his account was suspended:
'Part of the struggle of being “awake(ish)” is that many of your normal sources of support become flimsy or even can attack. Your preacher, teacher, therapist, mother, lover etc can be under the spell of false narratives or devious doctrines. Requires building a whole new network.”
This is not a political movement. It is a novel form of online religion enabled by social media algorithms. And it is deeply dangerous, not just because of its capacity for catapulting all sorts of misinformation but also because of its natural tendency toward political violence. After all, if you believed that such things were true and such people existed, what would you do to stop them?
One would think that the Republican Party would see the danger of this phenomenon and try to nip it in the bud, as surely as any political entity would try to quell a cult growing like a cancer within it. But it hasn’t. House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has come under fire for not doing enough to stop QAnon within Republican circles and hewing too close to Trump, but he is unlikely to be seriously threatened for leadership. Trump himself refuses to try to squelch the conspiracy group, seeing any supporter as a good supporter.
The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.
These (among others) are truly bizarre beliefs, but they are preached from the Fox News pulpit 24-hours-a-day on America’s most-watched cable news network. They have become part of our daily political existence, such that we barely stop to remark anymore on just how outlandish and nonsensical they are when given a moment’s thought.It’s a deeply conspiratorial worldview that depends on its adherents remaining ensconced in a bubble of alternative misinformation.
So it’s not a huge logical leap from these conspiracy theories into even more fantastical QAnon territory. It’s not a big step, for instance, from ridiculously claiming that climate scientists are all lying for grant money–which lacks real credibility as a motive–to speculating that they’re lying for deeper, more nefarious ends. In some ways the Republican tropes actually gain more credibility the more villainous the opponents’ motives are claimed to be. If you’re going to claim that Democrats want to offer universal childcare as an evil scheme to gain power to do vague unspecified things, why not go all the way to claiming that they want to keep patriots subdued so they can harvest babies for adrenochrome? If you’re going to vilify your enemies with absurd claims and keep your followers in a tightly controlled information bubble, why stop at a partially enraptured cable news/AM radio audience? Why not go all the way?
This is why the GOP can’t control QAnon. Once the Republican Party handed over control of its messaging to cable news and radio hosts, and once it began to depend on an alternative universe of conspiracy theories promulgated on social media to prop itself up, it was only a matter of time before these things started to take on a life of their own.
Now we are all paying the price as this toxic cult threatens to infuse American politics with even more extremism, misinformation and violence. But it was the “mainstream” Republican Party and its allies that laid all the groundwork for it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-your-field-guide-to-the-5-main-types-of-pandemic-deniers/
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Sophia A. McClennen / Salon July 26, 2020
Every day there is more data to prove the dangers of the coronavirus. Yet, bizarrely, the more proof we have of the damage of the pandemic; the more vicious and hysterical its deniers. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of uninformed, deluded ideas covidiots spew on a daily basis. We mourn not just the lives lost and the bodies damaged, but the collective intelligence of our nation. With international news consistently depicting the United States as the dumbest nation in the developed world, it is as if news of the covidiocy is almost as depressing as news of the virus’s spread itself.
The trend to what is described as America’s move from freedom to “freedumb” has sadly been a long time in the making. The pandemic only painfully reveals a process that was well-documented by Charles Pierce’s 2010 book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.”
Pierce opens with a story of Americans descending on the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where homeschooled children on field trips can behold a dinosaur wearing a saddle. With stories like these it is not hard to understand how this country lost its grip on even the most basic scientific concepts. It is not a big leap from dinosaurs in saddles to believing that face masks make us sick.
Shortly before the 2016 election we started to hear that part of the problem with America’s stupidity was the fact that social media allows us to exist in information silos or echo chambers where our ideas aren’t challenged and where we get a daily dose of confirmation for our brand of personal wackiness. Surely, information silos are a problem, but as the pandemic deniers have shown, there is actually a fairly diverse array of covidiocy types.
In fact, when we lump all pandemic deniers together into the same pile, we miss the fact that what plagues America on a cognitive level is a far more serious disease, one that has neither one symptom nor one easy cure. Here are five main types of covidiots to look out for:
The Eye Rollers
The eye rollers think that all of the news over the pandemic is exaggerated hype. This is the line of reasoning that suggests that if we didn’t test for the virus so well, our numbers would be more in line with other developed nations. The eye rollers think that the coronavirus is just like the flu and that its mortality rates are of no real significance.
You’d think all you’d need to do with an eye roller is show them the inside of an ICU or have them hear stories from those who have been gravely sickened by the virus. But the key to the eye roller is that they aren’t going to believe a single piece of evidence because, from their view, all proof of the dangers of the pandemic is manufactured to produce hysteria.
The eye roller is disturbing for the fact that they have a long history of not taking a single critical issue in this nation seriously. So, coupled with their eye rolling over what they perceive as coronavirus hype, they are also likely to believe that we have no racism, no sexism, in fact, no significant problems whatsoever. For them, liberals manufacture issues that aren’t real so that they can create social anxiety and elevate their policy platform. These are the people who disparage the Black Lives Matter movement as reverse racism and mock #MeToo as a problem of thin skin.
The Shoulder Shruggers
The shoulder shruggers are your Ayn Rand-style covidiots. These folks get the numbers and the science. They have a full sense of the dead bodies and damaged lungs, but they simply don’t care. They epitomize the “profit over people” worldview.
This is the line of reasoning we saw on display by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrickwho suggested that grandparents should be willing to die in order to save the economy for their grandkids: “My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” According to him, there is no reason to “sacrifice the country” in order to save a few old people.
Like the eye rollers, the shoulder shruggers have a far more pernicious mindset that shapes their views on a wider set of concerns than the virus. These are the folks who see in the virus neoliberal opportunities to capitalize rather than empathize.
The Narcissistic Hedonists
The hedonists simply don’t want to be inconvenienced by the virus. They want their manicures, haircuts and happy hours. Their own selfishness dominates their behavior and clouds their ability to consider the wellbeing of others. They see the entire world from the vantage point of their pleasure-driven egos and they outright refuse to be inconvenienced for the benefit of others.
The narcissistic hedonists talk about how they have a right not to wear a mask and how those who worry over the pandemic should just stay home. “You’re infringing on my rights,” they scream any time they are told they can’t enter a store without a mask. “This is a free country, and I’m here to shop.”
The narcissistic hedonists have no commitment to a social project nor do they care a wit about the common good. They have weighed the costs and risks of their behavior and they think that their own desires are more valuable than their grandparents’ lives.
This strain of covidiot also has a long history in this nation. Unlike the eye roller who thinks everything in the nation is already great or the shoulder shrugger who cares more about the economy than society, the narcissistic hedonist places their desires at the center of everything. And, even worse, they think that their own destructive ego-driven behavior is their “right” as Americans.
The Self-Proclaimed Scientists
The self-proclaimed scientists are a unique strain of covidiot that derives from this nation’s long resistance to expertise. The self-proclaimed scientist will tell you that you should not listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead you should listen to them, since they have done “research” and they know more about the virus than world-leading scientists.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently warned of the dangerous consequences of our national anti-science bias: “One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable — they just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority.”
Yet, as Pierce documents in the book I cited earlier, theAmerican tendency to eschew expertise and disparage science has extremely deep roots in our collective history. It is tied not just to religious extremism, but also to the history of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. The urge to put down teachers and professors alongside scientists is part of the American habit of distrusting smart people and it is tied to the idea that some folks would prefer a president they want to have a beer with over an intellectual or even highly educated president.
The anti-expertise sickness that plagues the United States is sadly to blame for much of the failed U.S. response to the pandemic, but its negative impact on the functioning of our nation goes well beyond flaws in our healthcare system and public health policy. As long as we continue to be skeptical of knowledge and attracted to BS, we can expect our nation to continue to look less and less like a developed nation.
The Conspiracy Theorists
One of the special features of conspiracy theorists is that they are found on both the left and the right, unlike a lot of the other strains of covidiots. They converge in the bizarre alternate reality of anti-vaxxers. But, regarding the coronavirus, the conspiracy theories are largely skewed to the right.
The range of conspiracy theories about the pandemic is simply too broad to cover in this piece. It spans from theories that the virus was deliberately started by China or by Bill Gates to theories that the virus simply isn’t real at all. Nature reported in March that “the website Biohackinfo.com falsely claimed that Gates planned to use a coronavirus vaccine as a ploy to monitor people through an injected microchip or quantum-dot spy software.”
Healthline reported in June that 25 percent of people believe unproven theories about COVID-19. This is all to show that there is a strange urge in this country to attach to fantasy theories rather than facts.
The danger to the conspiracy theorist is not just their refusal to accept evidence that challenges their views, but rather their paranoid worries that any evidence is actually propaganda designed to dupe them and cause harm. The conspiracy theorist is so worried thinking that information is manipulation that they lose any sight of what the truth actually is. And as coverage of a Palm Beach County Commission meeting that went viral for the outlandish arguments presented by residents against a mask ordinance (which the Florida county did pass) shows, covidiots tend to mix up their reasons for refusing to wear masks and take the pandemic seriously. Trying to follow these arguments against wearing masks will hurt your brain.
What’s worse is that having to “debate” matters of science and evidence-based medicine tends to leave us fighting each other rather than the virus. Even more disturbing, there is no vaccine for covidiocy: It promises to linger well after the virus has been contained, wreaking havoc on our society, taking up resources and frustrating progress. It’s a condition that has plagued our country for decades and it won’t be cured until and unless we make a collective effort to prevent its spread.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-anti-intellectualism-didnt-come-from-nowhere-the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all
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Trump’s anti-intellectualism didn’t come from nowhere — the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all
Written by The Washington Monthly April 24, 2020
Donald Trump recently created a stir by retweeting a call by a Republican politician to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. The reason: Fauci had the temerity to contradict the president on scientific facts. Then, whether out of fear or a willful suspension of intellect, the president’s coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx proclaimed that Trump has been “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data”—in contradiction to the avalanche of lies Trump puts out in his daily propaganda rallies masquerading as pandemic briefings.
Yet these are but surface examples of an ongoing tension between experts and Trumpists.It is a dynamic that has been at play since the very beginning of the administration: the war between experts and propagandists, between actual facts and “alternative facts.” Driving it is a wave of anti-intellectualism growing in America. And now, in this era of pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives are at stake. So, too, is the nation’s credibility. Given Donald Trump’s relentless antipathy toward truth and expertise, the outlook doesn’t look promising.
As the novel coronavirus rampaged across the country, a storm broke out in the White House over how to respond. Rather than taking dramatic actions early on to curtail the spread of the virus and prepare states and hospitals to meet the coming surge, the administration reverted to its profound anti-intellectualism, all in a bid to deflect its own failure in protecting American lives.
Disturbingly, Trump promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychlorine to tackle the virus, despite the fact that it hasn’t gone through the proper testing and approval process. After hearing about a country doctor in upstate New York who claimed to have treated patients for the disease with a cocktail of hydroxychlorine and other drugs with positive results, the president ran with it as a magic bullet. “I’ll tell you what, what do you have to lose?” he said. A just-released Veterans Administration study shows not only no benefit from use of hydroxychlorine, but there were more deaths among patients given the drug.Then, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro asserted that studies have showed the drug to have “clear therapeutic efficacy” in treating Covid-19 patients. Asked his qualifications for making such a claim, Navarro told CNN, “I’m a social scientist.” Others also trumpeting the medicine include the president’s usual Fox News chorus, led by Sean Hannity, and Rudolf Giuliani. This has had real impact: the White House directed health officials to put the anti-malarial medication ahead of other efforts to combat the outbreak. The federal government has since stockpiled 29 million pills.
Scientists, however, are counseling caution. “In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” said Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist. American Medical Association President Patrice Harris added: “You could lose your life. It’s unproven.” Axios reported a major blow-up in the situation room at one point between Navarro and a skeptical Fauci, who has confided to colleagues that Trump “almost always” ignores the advice he gives him before the daily press briefings.
Trump’s own CDC issued a statement on April 7 saying, “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” Medical experts are cautioning it will take a minimum of 12 to 18 months to come up with a vaccine.
In the meantime, Trump is putting the public health at even greater risk by propagating lies and misinformation. As of this writing, the coronavirus has claimed more than 47,000 American lives. Fatalities far surpass those in China, a nation with four times our population. And the rate of confirmed cases is growing faster in the United States than in all of Western Europe. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts some 67,000 Americans could die by August. Right now, one American dies of coronavirus every 45 seconds.
How many more will die depends on who is calling the shots: experts or hacks.
The Trump administration’s attitude toward science can only be described as contemptuous.There has been an 85 percent turnover of federal agency senior executives,and President Trump has failed to appoint anyone to nearly half of the federal scientific leadership positions. More often than not, Trump appointees are unqualified and ideologically driven.
Trump’s disdain for science comes with grievous consequences.He was alerted by the intelligence community of an emerging pandemic in January. Still, the president squandered more than two months before treating the issue seriously. That came after he disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic team and defunded a $200 million USAID program for detecting virus outbreaks overseas. Simply put, the president rid the government of some of its best resources to prepare for and respond to this kind of emergency. These actions come on top of the administration’s measures to marginalize science and fact-based research, including denying climate change.
But Trumpism did not come out of nowhere. Undergirding the president’s war on expertise is a recurrent strain of anti-intellectualism in America’s social and political DNA. As the late writer Isaac Asimov observed, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Trump panders to rightwing populists’ contempt for empirical facts and expert knowledge. Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has named science as one of his so-called Four Corners of Deceit, which also include government, academia and media. The coronavirus, Limbaugh said, “appears far less deadly” than the flu, but the government and the mainstream news media “keep promoting panic.”
The evangelical movement, a bedrock of Trump’s base, promotes an anti-science culture that rejects critical thinking.Pro-Trump Pentecostal preacher Rodney Howard-Browne has called his followers to attend church services in defiance of social distancing restrictions, dismissing coronavirus as a “phantom plague.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that anti-intellectualism also extends into the halls of Congress, where a sitting congressman declared a few years ago that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” and where the chairman of a Senate environmental committee brought a snowball into the chamber to prove that climate change is a hoax.
The coronavirus is not a hoax. It’s a mega-killer. A month after President Trump assured everyone that it would “go away,” more than 850,000 Americans have tested positive and the U.S. leads the world in the number of Covid-19-related deaths. Now, with his call over the weekend to “liberate” states imposing shelter-in-place orders, and red-state governors taking a care-free approach to social distancing, the risk of these numbers burgeoning out of control becomes very real.
Perhaps reality will sink in as the body count rises. Statistics, after all, are stubborn things. No amount of bluster, bluffing, and bullshit by the president and his enablers can obfuscate or contradict them. If there was ever a moment when it should be clear to voters why the nation needs a return to policies based on facts, knowledge, and science, this is it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-right-wingers-and-trump-apologists-could-get-people-killed-with-coronavirus-disinformation-columnist/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/here-are-5-ways-trump-and-his-supporters-are-using-the-same-strategies-as-science-deniers/
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Here are 5 ways Trump and his supporters are using the same strategies as science deniers
Written by Lee McIntyre, The Conversation November 27, 2019
While watching the House impeachment hearings, I realized my two decades of research into why people ignore, reject or deny science had a political parallel.
From anti-evolutionists to anti-vaccine advocates, known as “anti-vaxxers,” climate change deniers to Flat Earthers, science deniers all follow a common pattern of faulty reasoning that allows them to reject what they don’t want to believe – and accept what they favor – based on a misunderstanding of how science deals with evidence.
As I’ve been watching the hearings, I’ve noticed that a number of characteristics of this type of reasoning are now being embraced by President Donald Trump and his congressional supporters.
Characteristic acts
There are five common tactics used by science deniers.
In 1998, brothers Mark and Chris Hoofnagle (a lawyer and a physiologist) wrote an early blog post about science denialism. That was followed by further work by econometrician Pascal Diethelm and public health scholar Martin McKee and cognitive scientists John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. All identified the following factors as characteristic acts of science deniers:
Believing in conspiracy theories;
Relying on cherry-picked evidence;
Relying on fake experts (and dismissal of actual experts);
Committing logical errors;
Setting impossible standards for what science should be able to deliver.
These elements are present when those who deny the Earth is round or who believe vaccines cause autism insist that there is a governmental cover-up of the real evidence on their topics. They can be seen when Ted Cruz tries to discredit climate change with talk about the anomalous world weather pattern in 1998 due to El Niño. And they’re evident when intelligent design theorists complain that evolution by natural selection still has not been proven.
Alternative reality
Trump and his defenders in Congress echo this pattern. Even though Trump has firsthand knowledge of some of the facts under dispute – whereas his supporters may not – all seem to have bought in fully to the idea that the actual political situation is not the one pictured in the mainstream consensus of facts and evidence, but instead is based on an alternative reality.
Here are the five ways Trump and his allies use the same strategies as science deniers:
Conspiracy theories: During his questioning of Ambassador Bill Taylor and other witnesses at the impeachment hearings, Republican counsel Steve Castor repeatedly pursued a debunked conspiracy theory involving an alleged plot in which the Ukrainian government – and not the Russians – interfered with the 2016 presidential election because they were out to get the president.
Cherry-picking: Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that President Trump told him, “I want nothing from Ukraine. I want no quid pro quo.” Trump and his supporters focused on this statement as evidence of his innocence, despite the fact that in other testimony by Sondland that day, he said, “Mr. Giuliani’s requests were a quid pro quo for arranging a White House visit for President Zelensky…Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were important to the president.”
Discrediting experts: President Trump has repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that State Department and CIA employees such as Bill Taylor, George Kent, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman and others who have testified in the impeachment hearings are “Never Trumpers,” a term for Republicans who do not support Trump – and who therefore have no credibility. His supporters have latched onto this tactic. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said on Sept. 20, after the whistleblower complaint was made public: “It looks to me like another deep-state attack.”
Illogical reasoning: Trump supporters have claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky never complained that he felt pressured by Trump to do the investigations into the Bidens that Trump sought. Trump himself has described the July 25 conversation he had with Zelensky in which he asked for the investigations as “perfect.” But news reports have shown that Zelensky did in fact feel pressured, and analysts have pointed out that Zelensky would risk losing crucial U.S. support were he to anger Trump by saying that he felt pressured.
Double standard for opponents: Trump claimed that written testimony from the whistleblower was unacceptable, despite the fact that he himself had only given written testimony in the Mueller investigation. Some of his supporters seem to agree and have tried to compel the whistleblower’s in-person testimony.
Partisan logic
What might be behind the similarities between Trump defenders and science deniers?
Perhaps, like science denial, all fact denial is basically the same.
All ideology supports the reflex to believe what you want to believe.
Scholars have studied the role of identity in shaping belief and concluded that sometimes even empirical beliefs can be tribal,reflecting what the other people on your team want you to believe. Adherence to a belief is not always based on evidence.
The danger, of course, is that even as new facts come in, people won’t change their minds. This is the direct opposite of good empirical reasoning.
It is the hallmark of science that beliefs should be based on evidence, and that people should be willing to change their beliefs based on new evidence. This means that people should be able to specify in advance what evidence, if it existed, would be sufficient to get them to change their minds.
But are Trump and his congressional supporters doing that?
Like science deniers, no amount of evidence seems sufficient to change their partisan beliefs that the phone call with Zelensky was proper and that Trump “did nothing wrong.”
Even when the facts are overwhelming, congressional Republicans seem, like science deniers, willing to contort their beliefs and torture their logic, to stick to the party line because that is who they are.
As Sen. Lindsey Graham recently put it, “I don’t care what anybody else says about the phone call … The phone call, I’ve made up my own mind, is fine.”
In science, such behavior means that one is eventually read out of the profession – you’re not fired, your tenure isn’t revoked, but you’re no longer taken seriously anymore.
In politics, it is not yet clear what the consequences might be.
Lee McIntyre is the author of: Post-Truth.
MIT Press provides funding as a member of The Conversation US
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https://www.alternet.org/were-america-btch-white-house-allies-detail-trump-administrations-fck-obama-doctrine
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https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denialism
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frank Walton 819 an
At its core, Donald Trump’s love is filtered through fascism and authoritarianism. His form of tainted love rests upon moral inversion, a state of being in which truth is replaced by lies, empirical reality itself is usurped, and the evil and immoral are transformed into the good and the noble. As Hannah Arendt warned in her landmark book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
In this malignant reality, people who are in thrall to Donald Trump (or the other ignominious fascist and authoritarian leaders whom he adores and imitates) do not know what right and wrong are anymore. When these distinctions are pointed out, Trump’s supporters double down on their investment in the Great Leader and “the Movement,” focusing their rage and violence against the political truth-teller.
Donald Trump’s love is exclusive rather than inclusive, narrow rather than broad. It is focused inward on the in-group as a way of legitimating violence and meanness towards the out-group. Trump’s love is not a celebration of the best of humanity but is itself inhumane.
They have become an authoritarian cult. Maybe they already were after the days of George W. Bush and decades of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, the rest of Faux Snooze, Sinclair, Newsmax, Breitbart and RT. They don’t flinch at his crazed, inhumane, and racist actions because they support his inhumane and racist actions. They like it. They think every little time the media has a bovine birth over his latest nutball action like trying to buy Greenland like it’s on sale at Walmart is great. He’s just trolling the media, and also “pwning the libs,”, ha ha! He called the prime minister of Denmark “nasty”? Just like Meghan Markle and Elizabeth Warren? Fine. He also said London’s Mayor Saddiq Khan was a “Nasty guy” and a “total loser” but since he’s a dude, that makes it fine....
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