Agno bak
not sure how much lost 5/19
see alt fact post truth
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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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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.
REF
Does Kristi Noem know what habeas corpus is? One thing we know for certain: She would very much like Americans to believe she does not. On Tuesday, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used a Senate hearing to insist the legal term means the opposite of its actual definition. "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. She was interrupted by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who explained to a smug-looking Noem that, no, habeas corpus "requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people" and is the reason it's illegal for Donald Trump to round up immigrants and imprison them in foreign gulags without offering a legal reason why.
In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty.
Was Noem legitimately confused? Jonathan Chait of the Atlantic thinks so, writing that Noem's "ignorance appears to be utterly genuine." After all, "habeas corpus" is a Latin term used by lawyers but not much by laypeople, especially those, like Noem, who got a college degree through online courses at age 40. But I'm not so sure that Noem, who has been neck-deep in this debate about basic human rights for months, is as dumb as she seemed in that moment. Those who keep watching will notice that Noem doesn't act embarrassed when she's corrected, like normal people do when they get something so terribly wrong. Instead, she insists that "the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not." In this lie, Noem admitted that Trump is trying to suspend habeas corpus, not uphold it. It suggests that she knows full well what the actual legal battle is about.
There was much mockery of Noem for being so dumb in mainstream and left-leaning media, but notably, neither Noem nor her allies have shown any shame or defensiveness about her alleged mistake. Whether Noem comes by her confusion honestly or she was just play-acting, she's there to play the role of the proud MAGA bimbo, in the grand tradition of figures like Sarah Palin. 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.
*Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty. 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. Especially if said man, in this case Donald Trump, is himself dumber than a box of rocks. It's so much easier to be a yes-woman for such a man if you turn your own brain off completely.
For decades in pop culture, the figure of the bimbo has boosted the egos of men who need women to be dumb to feel smart. Being dim means she's not threatening, which makes the bimbo sexy. The allegiance of the bimbo is assured. She has to be loyal to her man because she cannot survive without him. But the bimbo was always more fantasy than reality. Marilyn Monroe could get laughs with her dumb bunny act. Yet, offscreen, she was an avid reader with strongly held leftist political views, who chose divorce when her husbands tried to limit her professional ambitions.
The 20th-century version of the "bimbo" was dim, but almost always good-hearted, exhibiting a childlike generosity to others. The innovation of the MAGA movement, however, is to make the bimbo a nasty figure, as cruel as she is dumb. In the past, what men wanted from a bimbo was someone with dog-like loyalty. For the right-wing man of our time, the craving is more for an attack dog, someone who will charge in to fight your battles, unconstrained by intellectual concerns about whether doing so makes sense.
Palin set the standard in 2008, when she was plucked out of obscurity as the governor of Alaska to serve as the presidential running mate to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. We can be more assured that Palin came by her empty-headedness naturally. During her infamous interview with Katie Couric, Palin seemed uneasy about her inability to answer basic questions about the news or civics. Soon, however, her shame turned to defiance, as crowds of base GOP voters — the kind of people we now understand to be MAGA — cheered lustily for Palin. Her fatuousness became a source of strength with that crowd because it fueled what they really loved: her ability to demonize anyone she didn't consider a "real" American. Even as she turned on McCain, Palin morphed into the fantasy attack dog the voters wanted. Ignorance is bliss, at least for bigots.
Related
From "Mar-a-Lago face" to uncanny AI art: MAGA loves ugly in submission to Trump
The mean-spirited bimbo isn't just a right-wing political project. It draws on another 21st-century innovation: the rise of shrill reality TV like "The Apprentice." There is, of course, plenty of good-natured reality TV like "Great British Bake-Off" or "Queer Eye." But MAGA's aesthetic is closer to the "Real Housewives"-style shows, where petty and cruel behavior is rewarded over human decency. It's in reality TV where the bimbo morphed from the sweet-but-stupid image portrayed by Monroe to the vindictive trophy wife who takes out her pointless grievances by throwing glasses of wine. Noem drove this home Thursday night by tweeting "Suck it" in response to a small court victory in her campaign toillegally detain and imprison immigrants.
The vision of the wine-throwing real housewife is the stereotype that Noem has shaped herself around, pairing her 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."
Is she smart enough to know better? Is it all an act? Is she really this brainless?
It's hard to say, but in a sense, it doesn't matter. During her Senate hearing, Noem was perfectly clear on one issue: Trump has an absolute right to rule like a dictator, and lock up whoever he wants without regard for laws, evidence and especially human rights. Being — or at least acting — too dumb to understand what she's saying helps her. It works like a shield, deflecting serious questions about her sociopathic behavior into a discussion about her IQ. After all, no one expects higher moral reasoning from someone too stupid to learn what "habeas corpus" means before testifying publicly about it. Her intelligence, as portrayed, falls below the threshold of moral accountability. 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.
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three phases ridicule: 1 RR quayle, had to pretend to be smart 2 acceptance palin? dubya 3) celebration MTG djt arrogance plus ignorance good ol boys
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
Andy Borowitz is known for his sense of humor, which provides both the canvas and the frame for his eighth book, “Profiles in Ignorance,” a wittily alarming polemic that tracks the evolution of American politics from grounds for gravitas to festival of idiocy. “Over the past 50 years, what some of our most prominent politicians didn’t know could fill a book,” writes the veteran New Yorker contributor and creator of the touring comedy show “Make America Not Embarrassing Again.”
So how did Borowitz evolve from funny guy to chronicler of absurd governmental high jinks? In a phone interview, he explained, “When I sat down to write, I was thinking from a comedy point of view: If I just put together all the funny things Dan Quayle and people like him have said and done, it’ll just be a hilarious romp.” He went on, “But as I started researching, I realized, this is a laugh/cry subject. When you look at the consequences of what ignorance has wrought, it’s really not funny at all. It’s tragic. So a thinking person — and I’m flattering myself by saying that I’m that — can’t just make fun of politicians and say, ‘Oh it’s all just a big laugh, let’s be jolly about it,’ without also saying, ‘Wait a minute, what is this doing to our country?’”
Borowitz grabs readers by the ear and walks them through the stages of ignorance, from ridicule (in this section, he profiles Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle) to acceptance (see: George W. Bush and Sarah Palin) to celebration (starring Donald J. Trump and, as Borowitz puts it, “wannabes like Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis — who, despite being graduates of our nation’s finest universities, strenuously try to outdumb him).” Yes, Borowitz admits, Democrats have also produced their fair share of dopes and ignoramuses, but for now he recognizes them as “supporting players in our national pageant of stupidity.”
Before you look into Canadian citizenship, Borowitz ends on a hopeful note, putting his own spin on the idea of thinking globally and acting locally. For his part, the Cleveland native accepted an invitation to join the board of his library in Hanover, N.H., where he lives now. He explained, “Ordinarily I would say that would be a nightmare because I would just be rolling my eyes and exhaling heavily like Al Gore during the debates and being contemptuous and sarcastic and everyone would hate me. I realized that libraries are now political because people want to keep certain books out of our children’s hands, so if I really want to participate in democracy and not just talk about it, then I had to say yes.”
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 16, 2022, Page 24 of the Sunday Book Review.
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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
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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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an 1 25
Historian: Trump’s 'us v. them' response to LA wildfires shows inability to handle 'moments of crisis'
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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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an 5 24 hmmn
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 2 23 raw
it may sound like an insensitive statement, but the cold hard truth is that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and their stupidity presents a constant danger to others. Some of these people are in positions of power, and some of them have been elected to run our country. A far greater number of them do not have positions of power, but they still have the power to vote, and the power to spread their ideas. We may have heard of “collective intelligence,” but there is also “collective stupidity,” and it is a force with equal influence on the world. It would not be a stretch to say that at this point in time, stupidity presents an existential threat to America because, in some circles, it is being celebrated.
Although the term "stupidity" may seem derogatory or insulting, it is actually a scientific concept that refers to a specific type of cognitive failure. It is important to realize that stupidity is not simply a lack of intelligence or knowledge,but rather a failure to use one's cognitive abilities effectively. This means that you can be “smart” while having a low IQ, or no expertise in anything. It is often said that “you can’t fix stupid,” but that is not exactly true. By becoming aware of the limitations of our natural intelligence or our ignorance, we can adjust our reasoning, behavior, and decision-making to account for our intellectual shortcomings.
To demonstrate that stupidity does not mean having a low IQ, consider the case of Richard Branson, the billionaire CEO of Virgin Airlines, who is one of the world’s most successful businessmen. Branson has said that he was seen as
, and has admitted to having dyslexia, a learning disability that affects one’s ability to read and correctly interpret written language. But it wasn’t just reading comprehension that was the problem — “Math just didn’t make sense to me,” Branson has said. “I would certainly have failed an IQ test.” zzz...So, what is responsible for his enormous success, both financially and in terms of being a prolific innovator? Branson attributes his success to surrounding himself with highly knowledgeable and extremely competent people. Branson’s smarts come from his ability to recognize his own limitations, and to know when to defer to others on topics or tasks where he lacks sufficient knowledge or skill.
This means you don’t have to be traditionally intelligent or particularly knowledgeable to be successful in life, make good decisions, have good judgment, and be a positive influence on the world. Stupidity is a consequence of a<...failure to be aware of one’s own limitations, and this type of cognitive failure has a scientific name: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
yyy effect is a well-known psychological phenomenon that describes the tendency for individuals to overestimate their level of intelligence, knowledge, or competence in a particular area. They may also simultaneously misjudge the intelligence, expertise, or competence of others. In other words, they are ignorant of their own ignorance. The effect has been widely written about, and investigated empirically, with hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed journals confirming and analyzing the phenomenon, particularly in relation to the dangers it poses in certain contexts.
It is easy to think of examples in which failing to recognize one’s own ignorance can become dangerous. Take for example when people with no medical training try to provide medical advice. It doesn’t take much Internet searching to find some nutritionist from the “alternative medicine” world who is claiming that some herbal ingredient has the power to cure cancer. Some of these people are scam artists, but many of them truly believe that they have a superior understanding of health and physiology. There are many people who trust these self-proclaimed experts, and there is no doubt that some have paid their lives for it.
What’s particularly disturbing about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people are attracted to confident leaders, so politicians are incentivized to be overconfident in their beliefs and opinions, and to overstate their expertise. For example, Donald Trump — despite not having any real understanding of what causes cancer — suggested that the noise from wind turbines is causing cancer
(a claim that is not supported by any empirical studies). It is well documented that on topics ranging from pandemics to climate change, Trump routinely dismissed the opinions of the professionals who have dedicated their lives to understanding those phenomena, because he thought that he knew better. It’s bad enough that politicians like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t recognize their own ignorance and fail to exercise the appropriate amount of caution when making claims that can affect public health and safety — but what is really disturbing is that they are being celebrated for their over-confidence (i.e., stupidity).
It is less surprising that politicians who regularly exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect are being elected to office when one realizes that they are being voted in by people who also display the Dunning-Kruger effect. A 2008 study by the political scientist Ian Anson surveyed over 2000 Americans in an attempt to see whether or not the effect was playing a role in one’s ability to overestimate their political knowledge. The results clearly showed that the people who scored lowest on political knowledge were the very same people who were the most likely to overestimate their performance. While this is shocking, it also makes perfect sense: the less we know about something, the less of an ability we have to assess how much we don’t know. It is only when we try to become an expert on some complex topic that we truly realize how complicated it is, and how much more there is to learn about it.
This new theory of stupidity I have proposed here — that stupidity is not a lack of intelligence or knowledge, but a lack of awareness of the limits of one’s intelligence or knowledge — is more important right now than ever before, and I’ll tell you why. The same study by Anson mentioned above showed that when cues were given to make the participants “engage in partisan thought,” the Dunning-Kruger effect became more pronounced. In other words, if someone is reminded of the Republican-Democrat divide, they become even more overconfident in their uninformed positions. This finding suggests that in today’s unprecedently divided political climate, we are all more likely to have an inflated sense of confidence in our unsupported beliefs. What’s more, those who actually have the greatest ignorance will assume they have the least!
What we are dealing with here is an epidemic of stupidity that will only get worse as divisions continue to increase. This should motivate all of us to do what we can to ease the political division. When we can clearly see the social factors that are causing people to become increasingly stupid, our anger and hatred toward them should dissipate. We do not have much control over our level of intelligence or ignorance, or our ignorance of our ignorance.
But this does not mean that we should accept stupidity as the result of deterministic forces that are beyond our control. After gaining a deeper awareness of our own cognitive limitations and limited knowledge base, we should do what we can to instill this higher awareness in others. We must not just educate the public and our youth; we must teach them to become aware of their own ignorance, and give them the skills they need to search for more knowledge, and to detect when they or others are overestimating their knowledge or competency
.
we have good reason to be optimistic that this is possible. A 2009 study showed that incompetent students increased their ability to estimate their class rank after being tutored in the skills they lacked. This suggests that we can learn a type of “meta-awareness” that gives us the power to more accurately assess ourselves and our own limitations. Once we can do that, then we can know when we need to do more research on a given topic, or to defer to experts. We can also get better at distinguishing between true experts and those who only claim to be experts (but are really just demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect).
We are all victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect to some degree. An inability to accurately assess our own competency and wisdom is something we see in both liberals and conservatives. While being more educated typically decreases our Dunning-Kruger tendencies, it does not eliminate them entirely. That takes constant cognitive effort in the form of self-awareness, continual curiosity, and a healthy amount of skepticism. By cultivating this type of awareness in ourselves, and making an effort to spread it to others, we can fight back against the stupidity crisis that threatens our nation.
Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/gop-ignorance/
an 922 salon
I spoke to Borowitz for a recent episode of "Salon Talks" about his deeply researched book on the GOP's long arc into paralyzing dumbness. He shared his insight on the GOP's "three stages of ignorance," which come with laugh-out-loud moments when he quotes actual words spoken by leading Republicans to make his point. Consider this legendary utterance from former Vice President Dan Quayle: "I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future. … The future will be better tomorrow."
But it was Donald Trump, of course, who weaponized idiocy in a way that went from being amusing to literally deadly, especially with Trump's mishandling of the COVID pandemic and the election lies that led to the Jan. 6 attack. Remarkably, there are now numerous Republicans with Ivy League degrees — or even two degrees, like Ron DeSantis — who deliberately play dumb to connect with the GOP base. All is not lost, however: Borowitz shares a few concrete ways that reasonable, intelligent people can reach at least some Republicans. Watch or read our conversation below.
This book is not exactly satirical. It's substantive, though often funny too. Did you debate doing a book about the profiles in ignorance and making it truly satirical?
It was a departure for me, because I'm known for doing fake news. I'm known for making up stories. I think I wanted to try something a little different because the news has gotten so ridiculous recently. The idea of doing satirical news has become very, very difficult. With Donald Trump, I would wrack my brain trying to come up with something ridiculous that he might do, and then 10 minutes later he would do that thing. So the news wasn't fake anymore, it was just early. And that I found frustrating.
I was on tour a couple of years ago — I did a standup tour called "Make America Not Embarrassing Again." I got into the topic of ignorance a little bit and I had this throwaway line where I was talking about Sarah Palin and her interview with Katie Couric where she couldn't name a single Supreme Court decision that she disagreed with, other than Roe v. Wade, of course. And I thought, you've got to be able to come up with something, like Ali v. Frazier or something, just pull something out of your ass. And I realized that was significant because Sarah Palin was the gateway idiot who led to Donald Trump. And that got me thinking about this whole rise of ignorance in America.
I went back in time and really focused on the last 50 years, which I call the age of ignorance. And I think that's where, although we've always had dumb politicians in our country, ignorance has really reached critical mass. You don't need to be satirical when you have comedians like Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle writing the jokes for you. You really don't. You can't top them, really.
You write about ignoramuses and argue that they're attracted to the Republican Party, or so it seems. Democrats, by contrast, have eggheads. You mentioned Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore, even Mike Dukakis. Is there something about the parties that naturally self-select?
I think both parties started in a similar place. If you go back to ancient history before either of us was born, to the 1950s, and you look at Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, both of them were actually big readers. Harry Truman didn't go to college, but he read like crazy. He read every library book in Independence, Missouri. Ike on the other hand, was also a huge reader, but he kept it a secret. He thought it was going to hurt his image. He acted like he just played golf all the time, but Ike stayed up every night until 11 o'clock reading. I think reading is actually a really good measure for determining how knowledgeable somebody is.
I'm a little bit hesitant to say that the Democrats are the party of smart people and the Republicans are the party of ignorant people. But I think the Republicans caught on a little bit sooner to the fact that this whole projection of anti-intellectualism was a vote-winner, and they really made it their brand. The Democrats were a little bit tempted by that too. I mean, certainly Bill Clinton was looking at Ronald Reagan and saying, "Now, he's got a real winning message. How can I dumb down my message a little bit?" So the Democrats haven't been immune to it, but the Republicans really are untouchable when it comes to this movement. They are really the vanguard.
Are you suggesting that Donald Trump didn't bring home 11,000 documents to Mar-a-Lago because he wanted to read them? That's not why he had those documents there?
This shows you how bad I am at predicting events. I never thought that, of all the things Donald Trump would steal from the White House, reading material would be among them. Never. I mean, silverware, yes. Maybe some extra bottles of ketchup, I don't know. Reading material, never in a million years.
We've always had dumb politicians, but in the last 50 years, ignorance has really reached critical mass.
They were begging him to read stuff when he was there. One trick they used with Donald Trump, and this isn't made up — nothing in the book is made up — but one trick that the National Security Council would use, whenever they had a really important memo they wanted him to read, they would put the word "Trump" in as many paragraphs as possible, hoping that would catch his eye. He really likes that word. I don't think it succeeded, but it was worth a try.
You describe three stages of the "profiles in ignorance." The first one is ridicule. Tell us a little bit about ridicule.
First of all, I should say: Nothing in this book is just my opinion. As you point out, it's very thoroughly documented. It's all facts. That doesn't mean it's totally serious. It is hilarious because, and I'm not taking credit for it, I'm quoting very funny people.
The three stages of ignorance are ridicule, acceptance and celebration. Ridicule came first. That was when dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. It was still important, we thought, for our politicians to be knowledgeable. Then after that, we moved into the acceptance phase, where dumb politicians felt it was OK and even cool to appear dumb. That's George W. Bush, the guy you want to have a beer with.And now we're in a phase, which is really the most horrifying phase, where smart politicians pretend to be dumb because they think that wins votes. You have very well-educated guys, like Josh Hawley, the world class sprinter, and Ron DeSantis, who talk nonsense because that's what they think their voters want to hear.
But ridicule — let's start with ridicule. There was an era a long time ago, say 50 years ago, where we still expected politicians to know stuff. The Republicans discovered in the 1960s, after the Kennedy-Nixon debates, that it was important to have somebody who was good on TV. Because Kennedy cleaned Nixon's clock on TV. Not on the radio, because on the radio they both sounded knowledgeable. So the Republicans reverse-engineered this and thought, well, instead of finding a politician who's knowledgeable and making him good on TV, let's just find somebody who's really good on TV and then make it appear as though he knows stuff.
And that was the beginning of Ronald Reagan. They recruited Ronald Reagan, who was at that point a has-been TV host. I mean, he'd hosted the "General Electric Theater." They hired this guy, Stu Spencer, who was a really shrewd campaign manager. And he hired — this is not made up! — some UCLA psychologists to basically, "Clockwork Orange"-style, load Reagan with information.
It was barely convincing. I mean, he would get up there and do talking points and seem like he had memorized the script, which of course he was really good at, since that's what he did for a living. But he won the California gubernatorial race by a million votes, and that really set the whole thing off. Because at that point the Republicans realized, we just have to find people who are good on TV.
Now, this backfired in 1988, because they thought they had that guy in Dan Quayle. They were convinced Dan Quayle was the best-looking guy in the world. Dan Quayle thought he was better looking than Robert Redford. That was his humble opinion. The problem was, Dan Quayle, unlike Reagan, could not fake being smart. Reagan, when he didn't know an answer to something, would just do a wisecrack. He'd say, like, "Well, there you go again," something like that. Quayle just got really, really upset. Nothing is worse than a guy who doesn't know the answer to a question and makes it really apparent that he doesn't know and is pissed off that he doesn't know. That was Dan Quayle. He just imploded every time his knowledge, or lack thereof, was tested.
Then you get into acceptance, with George W. Bush. He's asked by a radio host who the president of Chechnya is, and he goes, "I don't know. Do you know?" And they start spinning this. Instead of going, "We have to teach you more," a light bulb goes off. And that's the next stage. Share a little bit about that, please.
Well, this is where Karl Rove, who was really the Stu Spencer of George W. Bush — or Bush's brain, as he was called — lucked out, because he started with George Bush being a candidate much in the mold of Dan Quayle. Their ignorance was very similar. Their backgrounds are very similar. They were in the same fraternity, Quayle at DePauw in Indiana and Bush at Yale. And they were both knuckleheads. But the difference was, Dan Quayle would get asked these questions and then freak out.
George W. Bush would get asked questions and he would say, "Maybe I don't know that. Maybe I don't have to know that." He would sort of embrace his ignorance. And he said, "I don't have to know everything. I'm going to surround myself with people who know things." That sounds familiar, because Trump said the same thing. "I'm going to surround myself with good people, the best people." The problem is, those people didn't know shit either.
George W. Bush, just a few weeks before invading Iraq, did not know who Sunnis and Shiites were. I mean, he literally did not know. He was informed about this by some Iraqi exiles at the White House, and he said, "I thought the Iraqis were all Muslims." I mean, this was weeks before invading Iraq. While the book is funny, it also has a tragic side because we see the consequences of ignorance. It's not just all, ha ha ha. I mean, a lot of people die because politicians don't know stuff. And that's a problem.
But George W. Bush really turned ignorance into an asset. Because he didn't know anything and was like, "I'm like you. You don't know much either, do you? So I'm the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with." That became so famous. That poll was commissioned not by an actual polling company, but by the marketing department of Sam Adams beer. So we've been living with this incredible political wisdom courtesy of the Sam Adams brewery. Well done, America.
Sarah Palin was the gateway idiot who led to Donald Trump. And that got me thinking about this whole rise of ignorance in America.
Sarah Palin, as you say, began to show us glimmers of what the GOP is today: the the celebration of ignorance and the trolling. Like, I'm going to stick it in your face and I'm going to gin up hate against people on the other side. Is that fair?
It's totally fair, because what you find, and this is true in other countries too, is that when facts and information disappear, hatred and prejudice fill the void. It's easier. Learning about geopolitics is tricky and complicated. Learning about economics, people's eyes glaze over. But if you say something like, "There are rapists coming over from Mexico," or, "Barack Obama wasn't born here," that's easy stuff to grasp. There is a very nefarious side to ignorance, which is, what fills that void? In the case of Sarah Palin, her own campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, who was John McCain's campaign manager, when he finally sat down with her after she'd been selected, he came to the horrifying conclusion, and this is a direct quote, "She doesn't know anything." And it's true.
She had never heard of Margaret Thatcher. She thought that the queen of the U.K. commanded the armed forces. She didn't know who attacked us on 9/11. She thought it was Saddam Hussein. This was somebody John McCain chose to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. I actually found her defeat, in the most recent election [as a candidate for Congress], really encouraging. I really feel that her status as a national joke may actually have caught up with her. Wouldn't that be wonderful? We say history doesn't move in a straight line. This book tells a story that's pretty horrifying. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we're actually due for a correction? You can be dumb as a politician in this country, but not that dumb. That would be amazing.
Finally, you get to the celebration phase, and this is something. The celebration of idiocy and how dangerous it is. Donald Trump ushered in that celebration.
Donald Trump actually doesn't have to make much of an effort. He is one of the most deeply ignorant presidents, probably the most ignorant, in our history. On the internet, especially on Twitter, it's so easy to call somebody an idiot or a moron. I'm sure you and I have been called that many, many times — today already. But I really prefer the term "ignoramus" because ignoramus literally means somebody who doesn't know things. And Donald Trump does not know any school subject well, even the areas of his so-called expertise, like business and construction and renovation. He doesn't know about that either. I have a lot of quotes from people who worked for him who said he was completely at sea when it came to that stuff.
But what's really horrifying about this stage — there are two kinds of ignorant politicians we're dealing with now. We have Marjorie Taylor Greene, who comes by ignorance very naturally. I mean, she's the one who says that I personally have a space laser — which I wish I had! I wish I could operate a space laser. That is such a flattering assessment of me, to think that I could operate such machinery. I barely can get on Zoom, and she thinks I can do a space laser. So she comes by it naturally. Lauren Boebert comes by it very naturally. Louie Gohmert, people like that.
But then there are these super-educated guys like Ted Cruz, Princeton grad, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley. These guys know better, and yet they're making really dumb decisions because it appeals to this populist sense that we don't want smart people running the show. To me, the celebration phase is the most heinous phase, because we have people who really know better who are acting like dopes, and it's hurting us. It's endangering us.
How do you think that impacts the base? When Donald Trump would say things like, "I know more than the generals. I know more than the doctors," the way I interpret it is that his base, who loves him, is like, "Oh yeah, I know more than the experts too. I'm glad he's finally saying the truth." And I'm not saying you should question experts. But there are people who are like, "No, in my gut, I feel you're wrong. I have no empirical, objective data to back that up. But because I disagree with you, I don't care that you have a PhD and you've spent your life working in this field." During the pandemic, we saw how dangerous that was.
During the 2008 election, a British documentarian went out and interviewed voters in West Virginia and was asking them about Obama. Obama wasn't very popular in West Virginia. One woman said, "I'm not going to vote for him because he's a Muslim." And the interviewer said, "Well actually, ma'am, he is a Christian." And she said, "I disagree." I mean that is where we are — we've elevated everyone's opinion to the level of fact. That is very dangerous. But here's the thing. If we're going to believe in democracy — and I hate to be an optimist, but I am kind of an optimist — we can't totally give up on the idea of Americans learning stuff. We can't just say, "Well every Republican is an idiot and uneducable, and they can't be taught the truth."
One thing that I came across from researching the book is — you remember trickle-down economics, the Republican gospel that you cut the taxes of the rich and then the poor, magically, somehow get rich too. Doesn't work. It's been disproved a million times. I think, though, that trickle-down ignorance has been a roaring success, because we're social animals and we're actually very compliant.
I mean remember during the "War on Terror"? We actually paid attention to Tom Ridge when he had that ridiculous color-coded chart and said, "We're up to orange today." We actually listened to that. So when our leaders say things like, to pull an example out of thin air, "I really think that drinking bleach could knock out the coronavirus just like that," a certain number of us will say, "Well he's really important, he's the president, so that must be true." So these people have an enormous responsibility, obviously. What they say has enormous power.
If ignorance is trickling down, the only thing I can think of is that knowledge has to somehow push up. We've got to work locally and get involved locally and try to make our towns and communities better. Elect local politicians who are well-informed, get engaged in democracy in a way that reaffirms our belief in democracy. And then hope that will eventually spread upward.
We tend to nationalize every problem. We're on Twitter constantly. We think it's all about Trump and Pelosi and Biden and all this stuff. We take ourselves off the playing field when it comes to our little community, our town. Yet that's probably where the best democracy is happening right now, at the local level. And it's probably the thing that we ignore the most, unfortunately.
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how much red meat hype for trumpista base is bad faith?
eg
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/louisiana-s-kennedy-dabbles-modern-day-mccarthyism-n1284201
no lnx
louisiana's Kennedy dabbles in modern-day McCarthyism
If Sen. John Kennedy's line of questioning against Saule Omarova sounded familiar, it's probably because it echoed Joe McCarthy's tactics.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., speaks during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.Patrick Semansky / Pool via AP
Nov. 19, 2021, 6:27 AM PST
By Steve Benen
Senate fights over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are not especially common, but the dispute over Saule Omarova's nomination is proving to be unusual.
At face value, Omarova's story reads like a classic American story. She was born in Kazakhstan, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. She immigrated to the United States, studied law and business, became an American citizen, took on a role in the Bush administration's Treasury Department, and ultimately became a law professor at Cornell University. see WITH pod]
President Joe Biden nominated her for a position in which she'd be responsible for regulating bank assets — she specializes in financial regulation — and yesterday, Omarova's nomination arrived at the Senate Finance Committee for a confirmation hearing.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana apparently thought it'd be entertaining to take aim at her personal background, starting with this question: "You used to be a member of a group called the Young Communists, didn't you?" The Washington Post took it from there:
But this isn't where Kennedy was headed. Instead, he spent his designated time suggesting that Omarova was a communist sympathizer, beginning with that loaded question. Omarova indicated that she wasn't sure what group he was referring to, a bit of caution that Kennedy wasn't interested in. Kennedy, reading from handwritten notes, identified the group by name: "the Leninist Communist Young Union of the Russian Federation," also known as the Komsomol.
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As a child in a USSR country, Omarova's participation in Komsomol was not optional. The professor patiently tried to explain this to the Republican senator, who didn't seem overly concerned about the relevant details.
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"I don't mean any disrespect — I don't know whether to call you professor or comrade," Kennedy said.
Of course, why would anyone find such nonsense disrespectful?
As part of the line of questioning, the Louisiana Republican sought proof that Omarova "resigned" from the school program as a child. She explained that participants didn't have to formally quit the group, since they simply "grow out of it with age."
Kennedy, either confused or willfully ignorant, wasn't satisfied, seeking some kind of letter of resignation. No such letter existed, because the question didn't make sense.
The Post's analysis added, "It's safe to assume that Kennedy, who attended Oxford University during the Cold War, is aware that Soviet youth were conscripted into party organizations and that socialist views are not communist ones. But he is a politician representing a deep-red state, and he clearly understands that it's easier to submarine a presidential nominee using old-school Red scare tactics than it is to challenge her actual belief systems one by one."
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1021 ah
As much as there is to criticize about Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the right-wing Republican senator made perfect sense when he recommended getting vaccinated for COVID-19 during a recent speech at a GOP event in his state. But anti-vaxxers in the crowd responded by booing, jeering and heckling him, and liberal Washington Post opinion writer Eugene Robinson — discussing that embarrassing incident in his October 8 column — poses the question, "How dumb can a nation get and still survive?"
It's a perfectly legitimate question in light of the fact that Graham, in August, was infected with COVID-19 — which, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 4.8 million people worldwide, including over 710,000 in the United States. Graham had been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 but was infected anyway; he was an example of what medical experts call a "breakthrough" case. However, it wasn't a really serious or life-threatening infection; the senator didn't need to be hospitalized and was never on a ventilator — andduring his speech in South Carolina, he attributed the vaccine to the fact that his case of COVID-19 wasn't more serious.
But anti-vaxxer wingnuts didn't want to hear that, and they responded by booing him loudly.
Robinson writes, "COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease that has killed more than 700,000 Americans over the past 20 months. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all but guarantee that recipients will not die from COVID. I have, or had, an acquaintance who refused to get vaccinated, despite pleas from his adult children to protect himself. He got COVID-19, and it killed him. Most of the deaths the nation has suffered during the current Delta variant wave of the disease — deaths of the unvaccinated — have been similarly needless and senseless."
The Post columnist points out that Graham, unlike his unvaccinated acquaintance, is still very much alive — and he slams the booing of Graham by anti-vaxxer Republicans as "just plain stupid."
Robinson writes, "How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb? Why is the news dominated by ridiculous controversies that should not be controversial at all? When did so many of our fellow citizens become full-blown nihilists who deny even the concept of objective reality? And how must this look to the rest of the world?"
The booing of Graham isn't the only example of "droolingly stupid" behavior by Republicans that Robinson calls out in his column — he also slams Republicans who play "frequent games of chicken" with the United States' debt ceiling, obsess over Critical Race Theory and promote the Big Lie.
"Conservatives in state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation to halt the teaching of 'Critical Race Theory' in public schools," Robinson explains. "I put the term in quotes because genuine Critical Race Theory, a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, is not actually being taught in those schools at all. What's being taught instead — and squelched — is American history, which happens to include slavery, Jim Crow repression and structural racism."
Robinson adds, "I get it. The GOP has become the party of white racial grievance, and this battle against an imaginary enemy stirs the base. But the whole charade involves Republican officials — many of them educated at the nation's top schools — betting that their constituents are too dumb to know they're being lied to. So far, the bet is paying off.And then, of course, there's the whole 'stolen election' farce, which led to the tragedy of January 6."
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aha stories are tribal // echo boost ampl by soc med: chicken-egg ID --> story? vv? both?
scientists are global elite, eggheads who look down on us yokels/ppl of faith? goes back to scopes? crises--> magical thinking/end times? how much of sci sceptic comes from climate denial [trump i don't think sci really knows]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/here-s-why-anti-vaxxers-appear-more-likely-to-embrace-unproven-drugs-report/
ME
Anti-vaxxers, often motivated by baseless conspiracy theories, have a long history of questioning the work of the scientific community while discrediting medical breakthroughs. However, there is also a bizarre phenomenon of these same people having no qualms about embracing unproven drugs.
In fact, reports began circulating in September when anti-vax residents in Mississippi began using the anti-parasital drug Ivermectin as an alternative treatment for COVID. Since the drug is typically used to treat animals, it is strongly opposed to human consumption. So why would people who are deeply critical of medicine and the scientific community be open to trying unproven drugs?
Vox reporter Dylan Scott explores the mind-boggling hypocrisy behind it. Speaking to the publication, a number of psychological experts offered their take on the situation. Jay Van Bavel, director of New York University's Social Identity and Morality Lab, explained the psychology behind how people convince themselves to believe things that are known to be false.
"When you really want to believe something — like 'you can't trust the vaccines' — you'll come up with any number of rationalizations," Van Bavel said. "It's like whack-a-mole. You falsify one premise and they just create a new one."
Van Bavel also highlighted the irony of anti-vaxxers' stance and how it doesn't add up.
"On the face of it, it doesn't make sense that you don't trust doctors and science, but then the next moment, you're sharing news about some other medical cure and taking that and putting it in your body," said Van Bavel. "These are not trivial beliefs. These are some of the most significant decisions you can make in a once-in-a-century pandemic."
Scott also explained how difficult it is for new information to be presented in areas where people are predominantly skeptical about vaccinations.
"New information isn't necessarily treated as an opportunity to reassess their beliefs," Scott wrote. "Instead, new facts are seen either as affirmation of what this community already believes or as a distraction that should be dismissed because it doesn't neatly sort into their anti-vaccine narrative."
David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan also offered a similar opinion. "People listen to people 'from their group' and whom they think they can trust,"Dunning said. "People really don't know what science is, and so do you feel you can trust the person giving you advice, rather than appraising their expertise, becomes the thing."
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/how-larry-kudlow-set-off-a-right-wing-anti-biden-smear-campaign/
How Larry Kudlow set off a right-wing anti-Biden smear campaign
Jon Skolnik and Salon April 26, 2021
Fox News host and former economic Trump adviser Larry Kudlow set off something of a right-wing smear campaign over the weekend when he went on a tirade against President Joe Biden's nonexistent plan to force "plant-based beer" upon the American public, calling Biden an "ideological zealot" intent on scrapping America's most cherished tradition of meat-eating.
In a Fox News interview on Thursday, Kudlow erroneously attacked Biden for putting forth a climate plan that calls for the elimination of meat, eggs, and dairy from the American diet. "There's a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to…stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats," he started. "Ok, got that? No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue. I'm sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?"
Kudlow, notably livid over the thought grilling vegetables –– let alone foreign ones –– continued to rail against Biden's new climate action plan.
"You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4th Green. Now, I'm making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thing is stupid. It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don't care one whit about America's well-being. Not one whit."
It should be noted that beer, generally made from water, grain, hops, and yeast, and barley malt, is already, in fact, plant-based. Furthermore, nothing in President Biden's plan so far calls for a prohibition on meat consumption. The original culprit of this misinformation, a Thursday Daily Mail article headlined "How Biden's climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH," speculated that Biden intends on "cutting red meat consumption by 90% and animal products by 50%."
The article, quickly feasted upon by Kudlow and amplified Fox News without the slightest fact-check, was then picked up by Republicans in government, including Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who spread the lies to their voting bases.
"Joe Biden's climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year," tweeted Boebert. "Why doesn't Joe stay out of my kitchen?"
"Not gonna happen in Texas!" Gov. Abbott tweeted, with a screenshot of Kudlow's broadcast.
Greene, posting a picture of Biden eating a hamburger with others a table, echoed: "The Hamburglar. No burgers for thee, but just for me."
The misinformation also came into the good graces of Donald Trump Jr., who declared most proudly, "I'm pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That's going to be a hard NO from me."
On Saturday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explained how Kudlow's remarks planted the seeds for a concerted misinformation campaign.
"If you read what Kudlow actually said,'' Krugman argued on Twitter, "he's cagey — doesn't say that Biden proposed this, only that some people say this is what would happen. But Fox viewers won't notice, which is the intention. This is what right-wing politics is down to. It's all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it's primed to believe in liberal villainy. They're not even trying to engage on actual issues."
The White House has thus far released scant information about any formal plan to address emissions. According to the Washington Post, on Thursday, the President made vague remarks about investing in "American infrastructure and American innovation" in order to build "a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology."
The right's outrage was widely mocked online by the left, who were quick to point out that Biden's apparent political aversion to meat has no factual or historical basis at all. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took a jab at his conservative colleagues . "Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer," he tweeted, with a picture of himself holding a beer while watching the Oscars. "Thanks Joe Biden."
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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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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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opposite? experts?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/could-a-lack-of-humility-be-at-the-root-of-what-ails-america/
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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
no lnx
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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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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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/lazy-stupid-and-dangerous-this-ex-republican-explains-how-he-enabled-right-wing-populism-and-it-went-completely-off-the-the-rails/
...“I used to think right-wing anti-elitism against the intellectuals — in contrast to the left-wing anti-elitism against the rich — was innocuous and even well-warranted,” he wrote. “While warning of the dangers of populism, I sometimes indulged in this kind of posturing myself. Like a lot of conservative eggheads, I imagined that, even though I lived among the coastal elite, I was expressing the wisdom of the heartland.”
He added: “I now realize that these stereotypes are lazy, stupid and dangerous.”
It’s dangerous, of course, because anti-intellectual rhetoric is a common tool of authoritarians seeking to undermine anyone who could challenge them. Boot noted that Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong all demonized and went after intellectuals they feared. These actions mirror Trump’s attacks on experts and the media, whom Trump calls “the enemy of the people,” echoing Stalin himself.
Of course, intellectuals and commentators aren’t without their faults. Boot himself, as a backer of the Iraq War, would be a prime example of their failings. But anti-intellectualism — denunciations of the “chattering class” — was itself a disturbing trait of the second Bush administration as it devised to bring the country to war, with horrifying consequences. Public intellectuals aren’t above criticism, but a political ideology that denounces them as illegitimate should be feared.
When someone like Trump wields anti-intellectualism and hostility to public figures who can challenge him, it’s a clear sign we’re on a perilous path.
“In the United States, to be sure, it will not lead to Stalinist show trials, a Cultural Revolution or the ‘killing fields,’ but it could conceivably lead to the kind of soft authoritarianism that Viktor Orban has imposed in Hungary,” wrote Boot. “President Trump shows his eagerness to imitate the dictators by calling the news media ‘the enemy of the people’ and denouncing his critics as traitors. The president’s hateful rhetoric encouraged one supporter to mail pipe bombs to prominent liberals and journalists, and could yet spark greater violence.”
He also speculated that Trump’s anger toward the media and others comes not just from cynical political motives but arises from his fragile ego.
“More than a political threat, the chattering classes are a psychological threat: They feed Trump’s insecurities because he knows they view him as a buffoonish ignoramus, not as the 
that he so desperately wants to be,” said Boot.
...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/our-culture-of-ignorance-has-made-possible-the-rise-of-a-terrible-new-political-blend-neoliberal-fascism/
The ghosts of a fascist past are with us once again resurrecting the discourses of hatred, exclusion and ultra-nationalism in countries such as the United States, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. In addition, right-wing extremist parties are on the move politically in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The designers of a new breed of fascism increasingly dominate major political formations and other commanding political and economic institutions across the globe. They have infused a fascist ideology with new energy through a right-wing populism that constructs the nation through a series of racist and nativist exclusions, all the while feeding off the chaos produced by neoliberalism.
Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence and disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of a diverse number of cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital platforms, the Internet and print culture, all of which participate in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and an embrace of a culture of ignorance. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of neoliberal ideology, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Chris Hedges is right to argue that both the rule of law and the institutions that make democracy possible are being undermined. He is worth quoting at length:
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antivax420
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promote primary 4/20 on covid pandemic danger/qanon
perhaps neglected aha pioneer tag on early soc med viral
capt 818
long jbs history, revived? drs for dis prep
bak/capt 420 html ugly causeautism?
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/anti-vaxxers-are-latching-onto-the-coronavirus-pandemic-to-bolster-their-movement
no lnx
Anti-vaxxers are latching onto the coronavirus pandemic to bolster their movement
Written by Kaiser Health News April 25, 2020
While most of the world hungers for a vaccine to put an end to the death and economic destruction wrought by COVID-19, some anti-vaccine groups are joining with anti-lockdown protesters to challenge restrictions aimed at protecting public health.
Vaccine critics suffered serious setbacks in the past year, as states strengthened immunization laws in response to measles outbreaks sparked by vaccine refusers. California tightened its vaccine requirements last fall despite protests during which anti-vaccine activists threw blood on state senators, assaulted the vaccine bill’s sponsor and shut down the legislature.
Now, many of these same vaccine critics are joining a fight against stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns intended to stem the spread of the coronavirus, which had killed more than 47,000 Americans as of Thursday afternoon.
“This is just a fresh coat of paint for the anti-vaccine movement in America, and an exploitative means for them to try to remain relevant,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Hotez said anti-vaccine groups are seizing on the anti-government sentiment stoked by conservative-leaning protesters to advance their cause.
“Unfortunately, their strategy may work.”
A group calling itself the Freedom Angels, whose members last year stood on chairs and chanted at public hearings on the California vaccine bill, say governors are abusing their power by shutting down gun shops and other businesses.
Many anti-vaccine activists — who have claimed that diseases such as measles aren’t that serious — now contend the coronavirus isn’t dangerous enough to justify staying home. They agree with President Donald Trump that the “cure” for the pandemic could be worse than the disease itself.
That’s led some vaccine foes to join the protesters — whom Trump has encouraged on Twitter — in staging demonstrations in state capitals to “reopen America.”
“This is the time for people to take notice and really evaluate the freedoms they’re giving up, all in the name of perceived safety,” said Freedom Angels co-founder Heidi Munoz Gleisner in a Facebook video.
The group organized a Monday rally in Sacramento called “Operation Gridlock.”
“People need to get back to work, get back to life, get back into contact with their loved ones who they’re isolated from, they need to be able to have a paycheck,” group co-founder Tara Thornton told The Sacramento Bee, which interviewed her during the demonstration. “This is the grounds they will enslave us upon.”
Freedom Angels did not respond to requests for interviews. The group’s website mentions plans for additional rallies and includes photos from Monday’s demonstration, such as one in which a protester holds a sign proclaiming “No Mandatory Vaccines.”
But after the Monday event, the California Highway Patrol announced it had revoked the group’s permit for future protests because the gathering — which included dozens of people — violated the governor’s social distancing order. The highway patrol has now banned all group events at the Capitol during the pandemic to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
A big tent
The anti-vaccine movement has never been limited to one political party. Left-leaning vaccine critics — such as Children’s Health Defense, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — include environmentalists who are suspicious of chemical pollutants, corporations and “Big Pharma.” The Kennedy group’s website attacks Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for rushing “risky and uncertain coronavirus vaccines” into development as part of a “sweetheart deal” for drug companies.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many anti-vaccine conservatives oppose state immunization requirements because they distrust “big government.”
A group called Texans for Vaccine Choice has called on the governor to promise that no one will be forced to get a coronavirus vaccine in order to go to work or school.
Posts on the Facebook page of Californians for Health Choice, which also opposed California’s vaccine laws, question stay-at-home orders and accuse government officials of refusing to admit the orders are a mistake.
In a video on the Freedom Angels’ Facebook page, its founders describe stay-at-home orders as an abuse of government authority, and the closure of California gun shops as an assault on the Second Amendment. The group notes that guns could be essential for protection from rioters and looters looking to steal food during the pandemic.
In many ways, the conservative arm of the anti-vaccine movement is a natural ally for those leading “reopen America” rallies, said Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist and managing editor of the Science-Based Medicine site. Both harbor suspicions about government authority.
Vaccine critics, for example, have long championed the false claim that vaccines cause autism, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tried to cover up that information, Gorski said. Trump has at times linked vaccines with autism, although he came out strongly in favor of vaccinations during the 2019 measles epidemic.
Anti-vaccine groups are now rebranding themselves as advocates of “medical freedom.”
Protests against social distancing began in Michigan but have spread to state capitols in Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Maryland, Wisconsin and elsewhere, with more planned. Most protests have been small, limited to a few hundred or fewer people.
Yet the anti-vaccine movement doesn’t speak for everyone on the right.
Stephen Moore, the senior economic contributor for FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group that has been helping publicize the protests, said he’s unfamiliar with the Freedom Angels or their rallies.
“I’m personally pro-vaccine,” said Moore, a member of the White House council to reopen the economy. “Especially when it comes to coronavirus.”
And some heroes of the anti-vaccine movement say they support coronavirus lockdowns.
Dr. Jay Gordon, a Santa Monica, California, pediatrician popular among vaccine foes for downplaying the risks of measles, said the risk of COVID-19 is real. Gordon said he approves of the lockdown, “and we have to keep it up.”
Containing the pandemic
Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and California state senator who has championed stronger vaccine mandates, described anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protesters as “essentially selfish” because they put other people at risk.
“One of the hallmarks of the anti-vaccine movement is this sense of selfishness and lack of concern for other people’s health,” Pan said. “They like to talk about rights and freedom. But what they really want is freedom without consequences.”
Both anti-vaccine parents and those who want to relax social distancing assume that the medical system will come to their rescue if they become sick, said Pan, who noted that thousands of health care workers have died while fighting the pandemic.
Fauci has said that relaxing stay-at-home orders is dangerous as long as the virus — for which there are no approved treatments or vaccines — is actively spreading. Reopening businesses too soon could spark a second wave of infections.
More than 75 companies and research groups worldwide are trying to develop vaccines, which are seen as a key weapon against the novel coronavirus.
In the meantime, the CDC says that social distancing measures — such as working from home and avoiding large gatherings — are critical to slowing the spread of the coronavirus and preventing patients from overwhelming hospitals. Health leaders say it won’t be safe to reopen the county until widespread testing shows the coronavirus has died down.
Americans overwhelmingly support vaccination, according to surveys, and polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 80% of Americans want lockdowns to continue. Only 19% said social distancing orders placed an unnecessary burden on the economy. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Neither the anti-vaccine nor anti-lockdown demonstrators represent the opinions of most Americans, Pan said.
“Let’s put this movement into proper context,” he said. “They’re loud, they’re noisy and they’re small.”
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aha note escalator, and rexycling mutation/hybridization of older conspir BS
he's the next soros re covid?
Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host.
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news
mma many link, pix, graf/ twt
Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host
Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 04/08/20 12:13 PM EDT
A conspiracy theory about Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms, getting high engagement numbers, and has since been pushed by both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a Newsmax correspondent.
As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years, has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday and The Daily Show about the need for a vaccine.
Gates on March 18 also participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).
During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort (the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of Gates’ past remarks).
A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction around March 17, when a YouTube video about the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in Facebook groups and showed up as a meme on Instagram.
Infowars Bill Gates
Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” and the conspiracy subreddit on Reddit, where a user called Gates’ Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening, white nationalist Faith Goldy wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”
Faith Goldy Bill Gates
The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan, it was picked up by NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as YourNewsWire, which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated on social media and as a meme, along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”
Bill Gates Instagram3
On March 21, another YouTube video was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.” The video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements, according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page.
Bill Gates Facebook1
Throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” and claiming he is the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The videos included a clip from anti-Semitic conspiracy theory outlet TruNews and a video whose title called the virus a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements combined).
Bill Gates YouTube5
Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views (despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy). One video that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” and accused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.
Video file
CitationFrom a video uploaded to TikTok on April 1, 2020
The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”
Bill Gates Facebook Instagram meme
By April 6, bigger QAnon accounts on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler, who accused Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.”
That afternoon, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted a thread accusing Gates of “control[ling] global health policy” and saying that his “plan” was to use “vaccines to track people.”
On the morning of April 7, Fox host Laura Ingraham, while quote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's post about Gates’ AMA, said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”
The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have circulated on social media, including others about Gates and the virus.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-why-the-tormented-conservative-mind-is-so-drawn-to-the-dangerous-allure-of-miracle-drugs/
no lnx
Here’s why the tormented conservative mind is so drawn to the dangerous allure of miracle drugs
Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 3, 2020
In one of the oddest developments of the coronavirus crisis, there’s been a run on a pair of antimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which are used primarily in the U.S. to treat arthritis and to prevent organ damage from lupus. The drugs are being sucked out of pharmacies at an alarming rate, thanks to Americans who have convinced themselves these drugs will save them if the develop COVID-19, and thereby leaving patients who actually need these medications in danger.
This is happening in the face of only thin evidence that these drugs work against the novel coronavirus, and plenty of evidence that they don’t work. At one Paris hospital that used the drug heavily — on the recommendation of Didier Raoult, a climate change-denying French doctor with a shady reputation — the results suggest these drugs are not effective at all. Chinese doctors also concluded they were useless. These drugs are known to have some scary side effects, including sudden cardiac death in some patients. They are also notorious for psychological side effects, such as paranoia and nightmares. At least one person in the U.S. has died from swallowing aquarium cleaner that contains a similar chemical compound.
So why are so many people so eager to get their hands on drugs that are clearly dangerous and may do no good?
The most immediate reason is simple: The people rushing the pharmacies are Republicans, and both Donald Trump and numerous Fox News personalities have told them these drugs are a “game-changer” that can save them from the coronavirus.
But there’s a reason these false or unproven claims are resonating with the ordinary citizens of Trumpistan. The hope that there’s a hard-to-get miracle cure that will save them speaks directly to the poisonous social Darwinism that guides modern conservatism. It reflects deep hostility to the very concept of a shared public good and a fierce attachment to a racialized ideology of individualism that treats public goods such as health care as things to be hoarded by those with the privilege, money and status to do so.
Conservative ideology simply doesn’t allow for the possibility that anything, including pandemic management, is best managed with a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Instead they’re drawn to this fantasy that there’s a Platinum Member COVID-19 status that can be purchased, which will allow them to opt out of the suffering of the plebeian class that has to quarantine or risk sickness and death.
There’s no question that Trump and other right-wing figures are pushing this hydroxychloroquine angle hard. Trump has talked about these drugs several times during his daily propaganda-dump “press briefings,” as well as on Twitter.
Laura Ingraham of Fox News has been hyping this stuff heavily, hosting a doctor who misleadingly argued that “this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic” Wednesday night. She’s also had tweets removed by Twitter for promoting medical disinformation.
Sean Hannity of Fox News has been urging his millions of viewers to grab this stuff up as well, saying “I love the idea of off label use” and arguing that even if it doesn’t work, people have “right to try” — completely ignoring that these drugs are dangerous.
There are many other examples, carefully collected here by Media Matters. This kind of repetition works, and goes a long way towards explaining how enthusiastically right-wing audiences have latched onto these drugs as a possible miracle cure.
But hydroxychloroquine mania also flows from the rigidly hierarchical view conservatives hold of society, one where even basic necessities like health care should be differentiated along class and race lines. Public health measures like quarantine and vaccine are viewed suspiciously precisely because they involve everyone on an approximately equal basis. They long for a special kind of medical care, one that’s just for the people they see as better than everyone else.
This attitude has manifested in many ways before this crisis, most notably around the debate over health care policy. For progressives, the conservative resistance to a single-payer health care system is baffling, even viewed from the perspective of pure self-interest. Private insurance is expensive and unreliable, and since your plan is constantly changing, it can makes basic things like keeping a steady relationship with a doctor nearly impossible. A single plan for all Americans that covers us all in the same way would be cheaper and more efficient and take a lot of pain out of seeking medical care when you need it. That seems obvious.
But that’s just what conservatives don’t like about it: They don’t want a single plan for all Americans. The very idea of having the exact same health care plan as people they see as beneath them, especially lower-income people of color, causes an angry reaction. That’s what all the right-wing hysteria over “rationing,” in response to both Obamacare and the possibility of Medicare for All, is ultimately about. It’s not that you might have to wait in line for something like knee surgery, because that’s already happening under our patchwork private-insurance system. It’s that people you deem unworthy, due to skin color or class status, also get to wait in line and — heaven forbid — might be ahead of you.
(This attitude also explains the longstanding right-wing desire to police the food purchases of people on food stamps, to make sure they are sticking with “their” food and not buying conservatives feel are reserved for true and upstanding Americans. It also explains the often-hysterical levels of right-wing hostility to public transportation, which can be traced back to the end of the practice of sending black people to the back of the bus.)
In this worldview, certain kinds of health care are for grubby commoners, while the well-off white homeowner class should have its own elite status. This is also part of the reason that the anti-vaccination movement has taken off in this country. Vaccinations, after all, are an unpleasant reminder that disease has no respect class or race, but sees all humans as basically equal, which very much does not fit with conservative ideology.
Unsurprisingly, then, anti-vaxxer attitudes have taken hold on the right, especially in the religious right, which has long been tightly intertwined with a hostility to the government defining and controlling public goods, and has favored widespread privatization of everything from education to welfare.
A lot of people believe that anti-vaccination attitudes are most common among New Age-style leftists, but in reality, Republicans are more likely to oppose mandatory vaccinations than Democrats. It’s largely Republican elected officials who are trying to roll back laws requiring vaccinations, and the religious right has increasingly promoted the idea that it’s better for kids to simply get diseases like the chicken pox than to vaccinate them.
It’s true that anti-vaccination ideology started off in lefty circles, but that happened largely among well-off white people who may vote Democratic but tend to live in highly segregated communities and tend to embrace reactionary ideologies like “attachment parenting” that prevent women from having employment outside of the home. Ultimately, the logic of anti-vaccination comes down to a belief that an elite lifestyle of organic foods and helicopter mothering precludes the need for sharing the same health care common people use, including universal vaccination. That this mentality would leap to Republicans, who would lean into it even harder, isn’t really a surprise.
The irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the “elite” form of health care — organic food, a mother’s unwavering attention, chicken pox parties — is less effective than the universal policy that’s under disdain, which is vaccination. But that kind of logic, where reactionaries turn up their noses at the common good since it also benefits the proletariat, is hardly limited to health care. It’s also evident in everything from rejecting the local taco stand to thinking that hip-hop isn’t “real” music.
That tormented way of thinking is what’s driving the conservative enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The drug probably doesn’t work, and the side effects are scary. But getting a prescription for it helps set one apart from ordinary working people who are doing the stuff public health officials prescribe, such as washing their hands a lot and staying home (even though, for many, it’s meant the loss of jobs and steady income).
Even if a coronavirus vaccine is developed relatively quickly, don’t be surprised if many conservatives prefer the fantasy of hydroxychloroquine over having to submit themselves to the same jab that janitors and hamburger flippers will line up for. Most working-class people can’t afford to turn their backs on effective, preventative health care when they can get it.
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an 420
no lnx
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/new-study-finds-trumps-tweets-intensify-anti-vaccine-attitudes-among-his-supporters/
New study finds Trump’s tweets intensify anti-vaccine attitudes among his supporters
Written by April 3, 2020
New research has found that Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are particularly prone to anti-vaccination attitudes and that these attitudes can be exacerbated by the president’s tweets. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.“I’m generally interested in anti-vaccination beliefs because they have the potential to do so much damage. When Trump was elected it also struck me as a curious moment in history, because he was the first U.S. president in modern history to be on the record with anti-vaxx views,” explained study author Matthew J. Horns…
Read More
New research has found that Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are particularly prone to anti-vaccination attitudes and that these attitudes can be exacerbated by the president’s tweets. The findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“I’m generally interested in anti-vaccination beliefs because they have the potential to do so much damage. When Trump was elected it also struck me as a curious moment in history, because he was the first U.S. president in modern history to be on the record with anti-vaxx views,” explained study author Matthew J. Hornsey, a professor at the University of Queensland Business School.
Trump had sent dozens of tweets linking vaccinations with autism, such as one in 2014 that read: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM. Many such cases!”[see CPP?!]
Hornsey remarked that Trump is “the most conspiracy-minded president in modern history. It was natural to wonder, then, whether Trump supporters were more anti-vaxx than other Americans, and whether Trump’s tweets had the potential to still do damage.”
The researchers first conducted a scientific survey of 518 Americans who voted in the 2016 presidential election. They found that participants who voted for Trump tended to be more conservative and more conspiracy-minded, which in turn made them more likely to express concerns about vaccines and agree with statements such as “Children get more vaccinations than are good for them.”
“There’s a conspiratorial worldview that Trump voters hold more than other people; that it’s commonplace for groups of elites with hidden agendas to band together and conduct elaborate hoaxes on the public in near-perfect secrecy. And the data show that having that worldview makes you much more likely to be anti-vaxx,” Hornsey told PsyPost.
“We then did a study to test whether reading Trump’s anti-vaxx tweets still have an impact on the public.”
In the second study, another 316 Americans who voted in 2016 completed the same scientific survey. About a week later, the participants were randomly assigned to either view Trump’s tweets about vaccines or a view Trump’s tweets about golf. They then reported their levels of concern about vaccination for a second time.
“Trump voters became more anti-vaxx after reading his tweets. So Trump doesn’t just reflect the views of his supporters, he still has the power to shape his supporters’ views,” Hornsey explained.
“We thought that reading Trump’s tweets might shock liberal voters into being less anti-vaxx. But it didn’t. Trump’s tweets made his own supporters more anti-vaxx but had no effect on anyone else. So it was all downside; there was no upside to the tweets, sadly.”
Trump appears to have reversed course on this issue, however.
“Trump has stopped making anti-vaxx statements since he became president. Last year, he even encouraged parents to vaccinate their children in the face of a measles outbreak. We’re hoping this is a permanent change of heart, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Every president since Roosevelt has swung behind the science on vaccination. It’s promising that Trump has stopped backing himself into a corner on this, because his words can save lives,” Hornsey said.
The study, “Donald Trump and vaccination: The effect of political identity, conspiracist ideation and presidential tweets on vaccine hesitancy“, was authored by Matthew J. Hornsey, Matthew Finlayson, Gabrielle Chatwood, and Christopher T. Begeny.Trend MD v2.4.7
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Paltrow’s anti-vaxxer ally comes under fire for ‘discredited pseudo-scientific claims’ about coronavirus
Alex Hen
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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/2019/09/malicious-bots-and-trolls-spread-vaccine-misinformation-now-social-media-companies-are-fighting-back/
no lnx
Malicious bots and trolls spread vaccine misinformation – now social media companies are fighting back
Written by The Conversation September 27, 2019
Social media have become one of the preeminent ways of disseminating accurate information about vaccines. However, a lot of the vaccine information propagated across social media in the United States has been inaccurate or misleading. At a time when vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise, vaccine misinformation has become a cause of concern to public health officials.
A 2018 study showed that a lot of anti-vaccine information is generated by malicious automated programs – known as bots – and online trolls. In a striking parallel with the 2016 presidential campaign and the 2018 midterm elections, some vaccine misinformation on American social media has been traced back to Russia.
At Saint Louis University’s Center for Health Law Studies, I monitor legal and policy responses to vaccine misinformation. Now platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are developing strategies to address anti-vaccine bots and to try to reduce their reach in the United States.
Vaccine misinformation is all over social media
“Vaccine hesitancy” is what public health officials call the “delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines” despite their availability. The World Health Organization has classified vaccine hesitancy as one of 10 big threats to global health in 2019, on the list with air pollution, heart disease, cancer and pandemic outbreaks due to viruses like Ebola.
In recent years, social media platforms have become effective vehicles for conveying inaccurate information about vaccines, amplifying anti-vaccine movements and giving greater visibility to scientifically unsound data.
In a 2019 experiment, several journalists searched the term “vaccine” on Facebook. What came back was predominantly anti-vaccine content, even though the vast majority of parents – 91% in one survey – are pro-vaccine.
One study by the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. found that 41% of parents using social media reported having encountered “negative messages” related to vaccination. The number increased to 50% among parents of children younger than 5.
via MEME [matrix]
Memes and other eye-catching visuals can also help propagate the idea that vaccines are unnecessary or harmful, without any reference to scientific or medical data.
Anyone with access to a computer can easily spread inaccurate information about vaccines through social media.
But bots trolling social media can accomplish this goal at a massive level, as they have been doing in the United States at least since 2014.
Malicious bots targeting vaccine info
Bots account for a large percentage of online activity overall. Calculations suggest that between 40% and 52% of all internet traffic is automated. A study analyzing online bot activity in 2018 estimated that 20.4% of bots were malicious. Researchers estimate that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts, for instance, are run by bots, instead of people.
A 2018 study analyzing Twitter data examined the role of bots and Russian trolls in spreading vaccine misinformation. Researchers looked at over 1.7 million vaccine-related tweets between July 2014 and September 2017. Accounts associated with these two categories tweeted at a higher rate about vaccines than average users. While there are no published studies about other social media, researchers have warned of similar activity on Facebook and YouTube.
In the case of Twitter, there seem to be at least two separate goals behind spreading misleading news about vaccines. Most vaccine-focused bots are deployed with the direct goal of spreading vaccine misinformation, presumably with the purposed of amplifying anti-vaccine views.
But content originating in Russia conveys both pro- and anti-vaccine messages. This is part of a broader strategy aimed at sowing discord in the U.S. by stirring up conflict around divisive topics.
Some Russian tweets identified in the study used the Twitter #vaccinateUS hashtag. Of all the #vaccinateUS tweets that had Russian sources, 43% were pro-vaccine, 38% were anti-vaccine and 19% were neutral. A pro-vaccine one asked: “Do you still treat your kids with leaves? No? And why don’t you #vaccinate them? It’s medicine!” An example of an anti-vaccine one read: “#vaccines are a parents choice. Choice of a color of a little coffin.”
The U.S. is not alone in facing increasing levels of vaccine misinformation on social media. Canada has also reported a rise in the number of online bots spreading vaccine misinformation. Moreover, as content from social media is consumed across borders, these issues are now turning into a global problem.
Social media platforms clear out misinformation
A 2015 study analyzing vaccine pins on Pinterest found that the majority were anti-vaccine. By early 2019, the company decided to block all vaccine content from the platform.
Initially, the ban was absolute, regardless of the accuracy or source of the information. In late August, Pinterest announced that it would start allowing content from public health organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and World Health Organization.
In March 2019, Facebook announced that it would take steps to diminish anti-vaccine content. The company no longer allows anti-vaccine advertising and says it is considering removing fundraising tools from anti-vaccination Facebook pages. It no longer “recommends” anti-vaccine content and reduced the rankings of groups and pages conveying vaccine misinformation. They’re less visible, but not banned – these groups and pages are still present on Facebook.
Also in 2019, YouTube prohibited advertising on channels and videos that run anti-vaccination content. Until then, most YouTube searches for “vaccine” served up misinformation at the top of the list results. Afterwards, John Oliver’s HBO episode on vaccines and similar content jumped to the top.
Plenty of misinformation still online
As I wrote this article, dozens of new tweets were added to the #vaccine hashtag on Twitter. Several were similar to this one, tweeted from an account with over 11,000 followers, that conveys an anti-vaccine message under the guise of scientific information.
This account, which appears to be closely related to a previously suspended one, tweeted multiple times per hour. Less than an hour before the tweet above, it had tweeted a visually more blunt message asserting the false link between vaccines and autism.
Like most Twitter users, I have no idea whether this is a personal account or one operated by a bot. But for several hours the vast majority of the tweets on the vaccine hashtag were spreading content that is not supported by current scientific consensus.
While the latest tweets were predominantly anti-vaccination, when I sorted results by “top tweets,” a tweet from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pointing readers toward its own vaccine information page, appeared first.
But tweets 4, 5 and 9 in the top 10 belonged to the same account with 11,000 followers I encountered repeatedly while monitoring the Twitter vaccine hashtag.
With outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases on the rise, public health institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been increasing their social media presences. Social media platforms can continue to help reduce misinformation that could further increase vaccine hesitancy in the United States and elsewhere. As suggested by Pinterest’s approach, these tech companies can increase the amount and visibility of vaccine content from reliable sources. While it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all inaccurate posts, I believe social media can and should be redesigned to facilitate the promotion of accurate vaccine information.
[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]The Conversation
Ana Santos Rutschman, Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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kid in vax lawsuit gets measles?
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Only the lord God almighty is in control’: Texas lawmaker calls vaccines ‘sorcery’ in attack on renowned pediatrician
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement
Conservative Christian Republican also claimed that parental rights are more important than “science,” which he put in scare-quotes.
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cruise ship reportedly owned by the Church of Scientology has been quarantined in the port of St. Lucia after a case of measles was confirmed on board, health officials said Wednesday. There are almost 300 passengers and crew on the ship, which has the same name as a ship owned by the church, NBC News reported.
only one crew infected measles?
..."Because of the risk of potential infection, not just from the confirmed measles case but from other persons who may be on the boat at the time, we thought it prudent to make a decision not to allow anyone to disembark," St. Lucia Chief Medical Officer Dr. Merlene Fredericks-James said in a statement reported by The New York Times. St. Lucia cannot stop the boat from departing, which it is scheduled to do on Thursday, NBC reported.
Health officials did not give the name of the vessel, but St. Lucia Coast Guard Sargent Victor Theodore said it was called "Freewinds." The Church of Scientology owns and operates a 440-foot cruise ship by that name, and Theodore identified the quarantined ship as the one pictured on the church's website. The Church of Scientology did not respond to requests for comment from NBC, CNN or The New York Times.
While some high-profile Scientologists have spoken out against vaccines, the church itself has no official stance on vaccination, The New York Times reported.
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4/19
Anti-vaxxers are just as bad as climate deniers
Sonali Kolhatkar / Truthdig
There have been at least 555 confirmed cases of the highly contagious measles virus since January alone, prompting officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to call this…
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the disturbing reason Republicans deny science and embrace measles epidemic
Joan McCarter / Daily KosApril 17, 2019
All around the country, Democratic lawmakers are trying to stem the resurgence of measles by tightening immunization laws, efforts that are being rejected by Republicans, Politico reports. In Washington state, where…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/simply-wrong-anti-defamation-league-slams-anti-vaxxers-for-using-the-star-of-david-to-symbolize-their-persecution/
Some members of the anti-vaccine movement have recently been wearing a yellow Star of David as a method of protesting against vaccine requirements in the United States. And the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is speaking out against this practice, declaring in an official statement that it “trivializes the experiences of the survivors and victims of the Holocaust.”
The ADL quoted its leader, Jonathan A. Greenblatt, as saying, “The Holocaust was a unique event in human history. European Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David by the Nazis as a kind of scarlet letter—a form of persecution and forced exclusion from society. It is simply wrong to compare the plight of Jews during the Holocaust to that of anti-vaxxers.”Greenblatt added that “groups advancing a political or social agenda should be able to assert their ideas without trivializing the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.”
The ADL, in its April 5 article, noted that anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree used Holocaust-era imagery during a recent event in Austin, Texas—and that the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in Poland has vehemently criticized him for doing so. The Memorial/Museum asserted that equating “extermination camps like #Auschwitz” with “vaccination that saves human lives” is “a symptom of intellectual and moral degeneration.”
The ADL’s article also points out that social media giant Facebook recently announced it would no longer support anti-vaccination articles or ads.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-april-8-2019/
Pox: An American History (Penguin History of American Life) Paperback – March 27, 2012
by Michael Willrich
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https://theconversation.com/anti-vaxxers-appear-to-be-losing-ground-in-the-online-vaccine-debate-114406
As measles outbreaks spread across the U.S., our new look at how information about vaccine safety and reliability spreads online suggests that the tide may be turning against the anti-vaccination movement.
Between Jan. 1 and March 28, 387 people contracted measles in 15 U.S. states. Mumps is also coming back, with 151 infections in just the first two months of 2019. Both of these dangerous and deadly diseases can be prevented by getting the MMR vaccine, which is so safe and effective, and so widely used, that measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000. But more recently, new outbreaks have struck areas with large pockets of unvaccinated people.
Many states allow parents not to vaccinate their children if they have religious or philosophical beliefs against immunizations. Online disinformation campaigns are spreading false claims about vaccine dangers, boosting the numbers of people seeking those exemptions – and inviting disease into their homes and communities.
Our research lab has spent years tracking the spread of misinformation on social media, including about vaccine safety and effectiveness. Our most recent update of the data has found that pro-vax information and activity is beginning to push back against, and even overtake, anti-vax disinformation.
Mapping the spread of vaccine (mis)information
In 2016, we mapped the online debate around a 2015 California bill that eliminated the personal-belief exemption to mandatory vaccination rules. We found that several of the most-retweeted accounts using the bill’s main hashtag #SB277 were highly automated, appearing to come from bots.
Two years later, other researchers revealed that some of those accounts belonged to the same Russian trolls that influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Those now-suspended accounts tweeted both pro- and anti-vaccine messages to stoke discord.
We recently updated this work, looking at vaccine-related Twitter hashtags between September 2016 and September 2018, to see how the vaccine debate continues to play out.
We took a random sampling of 10 percent of the public tweets during that time period. We identified 41,998 posts containing the most popular pro- and anti-vax hashtags. We then classified the 27,590 accounts that generated those tweets as pro-vax (blue) or anti-vax (green) based on whether each one used more hashtags from one side or the other.
We used retweets to visualize the diffusion of vaccine information. A node represents a Twitter account; a link from @alice to @bob indicates one or more vaccine-related retweets of @alice by @bob. We then mapped the largest network of connected accounts for each of four six-month intervals. The two communities of pro- and anti-vax information are quite segregated in the network, indicating that the accounts in one group do not generally retweet messages from the other. In the last year, however, we observe some blue nodes connected to the green clusters, suggesting that pro-vax information is beginning to penetrate the anti-vax community.
Accounts likely controlled by bots are depicted as red nodes in the network. They are prominent on both sides of the online discussion: Consistent with prior research findings, bots share both pro- and anti-vax content.
In late 2016, the anti-vax movement (in green) was much larger than the pro-vax movement (in blue). Over time, the pro-vax movement expanded and now dwarfs the anti-vaxxers. Filippo Menczer and Pik-Mai Hui, Indiana University, CC BY-ND
Our analysis reveals the most influential accounts on each side – the accounts whose tweets are retweeted the most. On the pro-vax side are organizations like @WHO, @UNICEF and @gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as celebrity advocate @ChelseaClinton and pediatrician @luciapediatra.
On the anti-vax side, one account dominates all the others: @LotusOak, which gave as its full name “Vira Burnayeva.” That account was suspended by Twitter in late 2018 or early 2019. Interestingly, another account @ViraBurnayeva (full name “LotusOak”) that posts similar anti-vax misinformation and propaganda is currently among the most influential anti-vax nodes. The names suggest this account is controlled by the same source, illustrating how easy it can be to circumvent social media companies’ efforts to curb vaccine misinformation.
We have found some possible signs of good news: Initially most of the information on Twitter was dominated by people who opposed vaccinations. But in 2017, the scenario appears to have reversed: Anti-vaccine content is now shared only by a minority of users.
If that preliminary finding is confirmed by other research, it could provide evidence that the combined efforts of social media platforms, health organizations, public policy campaigns and grassroots advocacy may eventually overcome anti-vax junk science.
Who profits from vaccine opposition?
The modern anti-vax movement is still around, at least in part, because it makes money. It originated from a disproven, false claim about a link between vaccines and autism in a fraudulent, retracted 1998 paper by British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield. Reportedly driven by financial profit motives, Wakefield falsified data and allegedly abused developmentally delayed children.
His U.K. medical license was revoked in 2010 for unethical behavior, misconduct and dishonesty. But he continues to oppose state bills against vaccine exemptions and profit from promoting anti-vax disinformation, including through his propaganda film “Vaxxed,” which is available on popular streaming platforms.
Others profit from spreading this misinformation, too. For example, InfoWars and Natural News discredit medical science while earning money from the sale of alternative medicine products. The disinformation spreads quickly on social media through a well-connected network of activists and concerned parents.
When enough parents in a specific local community are misled into forgoing vaccination of their children, that area’s vaccination rate falls below the level necessary to confer what is called “herd immunity” on the entire population. For measles, 96 percent or more of a population need to be vaccinated to protect everyone.
Communities with lower vaccination rates are where outbreaks happen. For example, the 2017 measles outbreak in Minnesota followed an anti-vax disinformation campaign targeting Somali immigrants. The current outbreak in Washington affects mostly Slavic immigrants.
Some of the parents may be making their decisions based on what they learn online about vaccination.
On the legislative agenda
Much of this online activity appears to relate to debate in the real world. For instance, many of the tweets refer to legislation or other policy discussions. And there is a fair amount of disagreement in the political world.
At the moment, almost all states grant religious exemptions and 17 states allow parents to refuse vaccinations on philosophical grounds. Congress is studying the issue.
Some states, like Arizona, are working to expand those exemptions, although the state’s governor has vowed to veto such bills.
Other states are pushing in the opposite direction: Mississippi doesn’t have a religious exemption and has rejected attempts to create one. Washington is considering a bill that would grant exemptions only to parents of children with religious or medical reasons to refuse immunizations, much like California’s SB277 did. Rockland County, New York, has banned unvaccinated minors from public places to curtail the spread of disease.
This may be a legislative reflection of the same trend our research has observed online – where pro-vax information is beginning to push back effectively against the anti-vax movement. Children’s lives are at risk.
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GoFundMe bans antivax fundraisers as tech companies finally crack down on medical disinformation
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gov exposed kids to c pox?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/right-wing-politician-who-condemned-mandatory-vaccination-hospitalized-for-chickenpox/
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Rand Paul says we shouldn’t be “giving up on liberty” by ensuring kids get vaccinated.
At a moment in our country when previously-eradicated deadly childhood illnesses like measles are resurging in the United States, Sen. Rand Paul wants to speak out against mandatory childhood vaccinations — not, he stressed, because he believes they don’t work or because he buys conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism, but because gosh darn it, parents deserve freedom.
“As we contemplate forcing parents to choose this or that vaccine, I think it’s important to remember that force is not consistent with the American story, nor is force consistent with liberty our forefathers sought when they came to America,” said Paul in a Senate Health Committee hearing on Tuesday. “I believe that the benefits of vaccines greatly outweigh the risks, but I still don’t favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security.”
Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a former physician, smacked him down, saying, “I’ve seen people who have not been vaccinated who required liver transplantation because they were not.”
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anti-vaxxers sorta, but no mention of recent outbreak in US NW, amazing pro UN, dump on france; yemen mentioned but not 1 mil cholera
https://www.breitbart.com/news/un-warns-of-complacency-as-measles-cases-soar-worldwide-2/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/anti-vax-mom-and-unsubtle-sexism-why-the-internets-latest-meme-is-more-about-mocking-women-than-mocking-pseudoscience/
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a large measles outbreak in Washington state. Vox's Julia Belluz looked into a study about what makes people fall for anti-vaccine messaging, honing in on the ideas of liberty and purity. One suggestion from the author of the study for reaching these people is framing vaccines as something that is natural.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/heres-why-vaccine-opponents-think-they-know-more-than-medical-experts/
One of the most contentious areas of health policy over the past two decades has been the safety of vaccination. Vaccines prevent the outbreak of diseases that used to be widespread, like polio, and scientific consensus strongly supports their safety. Yet many Americans refuse or delay the vaccination of their children out of fear that it could lead to autism, even though scientific consensus refutes this claim.
Anti-vaccine attitudes have been fueled in large part by growing rates of autism diagnoses as well as a now debunked study in The Lancet that linked autism and the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine – pushing many parents to see vaccination as a potential explanation for their child’s autism diagnosis.
The growing “anti-vax” movement here and abroad has seen parents refuse to give their children mandatory school vaccinations, growing numbers of celebrities questioning vaccine safety, and even pet owners refusing to vaccinate their dogs – forcing the British Veterinary Association to issue a statement in April that dogs cannot develop autism.
Given the consistent message from the scientific community about the safety of vaccines, and evidence of vaccine success as seen through the eradication of diseases, why has the skepticism about vaccines continued?
One possibility is that attitudes about medical experts help to explain the endorsement of anti-vax attitudes. Specifically, building on past research, our research team contends that some U.S. adults might support anti-vax policy positions in part because they believe they know more than medical experts about autism and its causes. We wanted to test this theory.
Vaccine skepticism and knowledge
A child in Romania, on June 6, 2018, receives vaccination after a measles outbreak has sickened hundreds of children. Health officials say the outbreak is serious because of low vaccination rates.And yet, vaccine skepticism persists, extending into the political realm, with many politicians questioning the safety of vaccines. Most notably, President Donald Trump has questioned the credentials of doctors calling for vaccination, pushed for slowed vaccination schedules, and tapped vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr. to chair an administrative panel on vaccine safety.
We wondered: Could the inability of anti-vaxxers to accurately appraise their own knowledge and skills compared to those of medical experts play a role in shaping their attitudes about vaccines? This inability to accurately appraise one’s own knowledge is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, first identified in social psychology. Dunning-Kruger effects occur when individuals’ lack of knowledge about a particular subject leads them to inaccurately gauge their expertise on that subject. Ignorance of one’s own ignorance can lead people who lack knowledge on a subject think of themselves as more expert than those who are comparatively better informed. We refer to this as “overconfidence.”
Dunning-Kruger effects and anti-vax attitudes
To test our hypothesis, our research asked more than 1,300 Americans in December 2017 to compare their own perceived levels of knowledge about the causes of autism to those of medical doctors and scientists. After doing that, we asked respondents to answer a series of factual knowledge questions about autism, as well as the extent to which they agree with misinformation about a potential link between childhood vaccines and autism.
We found that 34 percent of U.S. adults in our sample feel that they know as much or more than scientists about the causes of autism. Slightly more, or 36 percent, feel the same way about their knowledge relative to that of medical doctors.
We also found strong evidence of Dunning-Kruger effects in our sample. Sixty-two percent of those who performed worst on our autism knowledge test believe that they know as much or more than both doctors and scientists about the causes of autism, compared to only 15 percent of those scoring best on the knowledge test. Likewise, 71 percent of those who strongly endorse misinformation about the link between vaccines and autism feel that they know as much or more than medical doctors about the causes of autism, compared to only 28 percent of those who most strongly reject that misinformation.
We recently published our findings at the journal Social Science and Medicine.
How does this affect vaccine policy?
Our research also finds that these Dunning-Kruger effects have important implications for vaccine policy.
In addition to gauging autism knowledge, our survey asked respondents to share their opinions on several aspects of vaccine policy. For example, we asked respondents whether or not they support parents’ decisions to not vaccinate their children before sending them to public schools. Respondents could tell us whether they strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree or strongly disagree with that statement.
We found that nearly a third, or 30 percent, of people who think that they know more than medical experts about the causes of autism strongly support giving parents the latitude to not vaccinate their children. In contrast, 16 percent of those who do not think that they know more than medical professionals felt the same way.
Our study also finds that people who think they know more than medical experts are more likely to trust information about vaccines from non-expert sources, such as celebrities. These individuals are also more likely to support a strong role for non-experts in the process of making policies that pertain to vaccines and vaccination.
An uphill battle?
Ultimately, our results point to the uphill battle that the scientific community faces as it confronts growing anti-vax sentiment from the public and politicians alike. Even as the mountain of evidence on the safety and importance of vaccines from doctors and scientists continues to grow, many Americans think they know more than the experts trying to correct their misperceptions.
Therefore, finding new ways to present scientific consensus on vaccines to an audience skeptical of medical experts should be a priority. Our research suggests that one interesting area for future research could be to examine whether pro-vaccine information from non-expert sources like celebrities could persuade those with anti-vaccine policy attitudes to change their minds.
Matthew Motta, Postdoctoral fellow, University of Pennsylvania; Steven Sylvester, Assistant professor, public policy, Utah Valley University, and Timothy Callaghan, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University School of Public Health, Texas A&M University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Here are 3 life-saving reasons we should remove state vaccination exemption clauses
Imagine your child in the intensive care unit, sedated and on life support. You brought them to the emergency room with a fever and watched as their lungs faltered, the war being waged inside their little body. They are now attached to a ventilator that breathes for them, and a machine is delivering oxygen to their blood outside of their body. Your child is alive thanks to the unbelievable power of modern medicine, but fighting for their life. Your child has the flu.
Stories like these are becoming a common occurrence, especially at the peak of the flu season. During my career as a registered nurse in a large academic medical center, I have had the displeasure of watching the influenza virus ravage even the healthiest of individuals. It is a merciless and indiscriminate enemy. It is also largely preventable.
Yet recent data suggests parents of school-age kids in Texas are opting out of vaccinations, including the flu vaccine, at alarming rates. Texas — along with 16 other states — allows parents of school-age children to opt out of required school vaccinations on the basis of conscience. This clause has allowed for a recent explosion in the number of vaccine exemptions.
In virtually every school district within and around Austin, the vaccine exemption rate has risen. Nearly 50 percent of students attending Austin Waldorf School — a staggering statistic — went unvaccinated this past school year.
In the larger Austin school districts, such as Austin ISD, the exemption rate is now roughly twice the state average. This is a cause for concern.
Local clinics and hospitals can become overwhelmed with treating preventable illnesses during peak seasons, which can lead to delays in care and increased healthcare expenditures. In addition, herd immunity — the reduced risk of contracting a disease when a majority of a community is immunized — can become unpredictable with an increase in opt-outs, putting the most vulnerable among the community at greater risk.
Studies have shown that states with lenient vaccination laws often have higher nonmedical exemption rates and disease rates. It’s time to forego the nonmedical exemption clause and reframe our school vaccination requirements to reflect recent discoveries.
So, what would it look like to have Texas’ exemption clause removed? For one, the rate of vaccinated school-aged children would likely rise. In 2015, California passed SB277 which eliminated nonmedical exemptions for school entry. It was the first state in almost 35 years to do so. In the two years following the bill’s passing, California saw a nearly 2.5% increase in statewide kindergartners receiving school-entry vaccines.
Second, there would likely be a decline in the rate of children contracting — and dying from — preventable infectious diseases such as the flu, measles, and pertussis. Hospital admission rates related to these illnesses would in turn decrease.
Finally, a discussion on vaccinations would be incomplete without addressing autism. From the mouths of celebrities (think Jenny McCarthy) to the average parent’s Facebook newsfeed, the idea that vaccines cause autism is rampant. It’s also incorrect, dangerous propaganda. The only two published studies — by the same author, no less — that claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism were critically flawed and later retracted from scientific records. To be crystal clear, vaccines have not been found to cause autism. They also do not cause that which they are designed to prevent — a common flu vaccine myth.
Legislators of Texas, in the midst of ever-increasing vaccination exemptions, consider drafting legislation to eliminate exemptions of conscience.
And parents, with the flu season upon us, I implore you to vaccinate your children. The lives of our kids are invaluable. Without this lifesaving preventative medicine, the next victim of this unforgiving killer could be yours.
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AW
father of the anti-vaccine movement, “[doesn’t] feel responsible at all” for the ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota.
We beg to differ.
The largest ever measles outbreak in the state’s history is propagating among a tight-knit Somali immigrant community – the same community Wakefield visited at least three times in 2010 and 2011 to warn parents against vaccinating their children. His message clearly took root, because 92 percent of the 50 children affected in the current outbreak were either never vaccinated against measles, or did not finish the vaccine’s full course.
Wakefield and others who peddle the falsehood that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism are almost entirely responsible for the virus’ rampage against this community.
Vaccination safety isn’t a matter of opinion. A study in the Journal of American Medicine followed more than 95,000 children to conclude that the MMR vaccine doesn’t increase the risk of autism, even among the highest-risk children. Autism appears with equal frequency in vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and a firm scientific consensus – to the tune of tens of thousands of independent studies – confirms vaccines aren’t responsible.
Rarely will junk science have as immediate and deadly an impact as the anti-vaccine movement. Although most measles cases are limited to a high fever, flu-like symptoms, and a full-body rash, complications can include life-threatening swelling of the brain and pneumonia.
Measles is incredibly contagious. Roughly 90% of people not already immune to the virus (through vaccine or prior infection) but living with an infected person will catch it. Prior to vaccine availability in the 1960’s, an average of 500,000 Americans could expect to be infected each year.
That doesn’t even consider the litany of other vaccine-preventable diseases which anti-vaxxers presumably subject their children to, including:
Pneumonia, meningitis (swelling around brain and spinal cord), chickenpox, hepatitis A and B (liver infections), rotavirus (diarrhea), diphtheria (severe, thick throat infection), tetanus (painful muscle spasms) whooping cough, and HPV(cervical cancer).
Despite these very real risks, the anti-vaccine movement still clings to the wholly disproven notion that immunization causes autism. The very minor chance of vaccine-related injury is far outweighed by the benefits of vaccination in preventing deadly disease.
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North Carolina is reporting the worst chickenpox outbreak since a vaccine for it was introduced more than 20 years ago. Ground zero for the outbreak is the Asheville Waldorf School, where 36 children have come down with chickenpox.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that "the percentage of children under 2 years old who haven’t received any vaccinations has quadrupled since 2001," according to the Washington Post. Many of the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children do so under a religious beliefs exemption. "[T]he flare-up demonstrates the real-life consequences of a shadowy debate fueled by junk science and fomented by the same sort of Twitter bots and trolls that spread misinformation during the 2016 presidential election."
The claim of an autism risk, though it has been debunked, has remained a rallying cry of the anti-vaccine movement.
“What’s the big deal with chickenpox?” one city resident, Amy Gordon, told the Citizen-Times.
Chickenpox is serious, warns the CDC, “even life-threatening, especially in babies, adolescents, adults, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems.”
Related: Throwing Science At Anti-Vaxxers Just Makes Them More Hardline
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https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-pregnant-women-are-falling-anti-vaxxer-propaganda-and-how-we-can-stop-it-spreading
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https://www.alternet.org/celebrity-pseudoscience-here-are-nine-household-names-whove-pushed-bad-science-public
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https://www.alternet.org/psychologist-explains-thinking-error-root-science-denial
there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominentmembers of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.
This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.
Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways....
As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.
In this type of cognition, a spectrum of possibilities is divided into two parts, with a blurring of distinctions within those categories. Shades of gray are missed; everything is considered either black or white. Dichotomous thinking is not always or inevitably wrong, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities because these usually involve spectrums of possibilities, not binaries....
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http://www.ecowatch.com/cdc-corruption-robert-kennedy-jr-2096438139.html
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hmn
http://www.globalpossibilities.org/vaccines-retroviruses-dna-and-the-discovery-that-destroyed-judy-mikovits-career/
==
http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/researchers-may-have-found-what-causes-autism-and-even-how-to-prevent-it
gut bacteria
==
wait, what?
http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-great-vaxxed-debate/
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offit, paul acsh
~ vaxxers gives him cover was cigs sis for Whelan? michael specter?
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movies, deniro, RFK2, jenny mccarthy goofy husband;
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day after Governor Jerry Brown signed a tough vaccination bill into law, former assemblyman and gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly started an effort to repeal it.
The new law aims to boost immunization rates by requiring that children be vaccinated to attend public or private daycare or school. The law eliminates exemptions based on personal beliefs and religion, while maintaining a medical exemption.
Donnelly submitted his proposed referendum in a July 1 letter. He has 90 days from the date Brown signed the bill to circulate and file petitions. He will need to collect more than 365,000 valid signatures to qualify for the Nov. 2016 ballot.
In a phone interview with KPCC, Donnelly, who’s now a radio host, said the new law is “devastating” to parents’ right to choose which medical care their children receive. “Why should the state have more control over our children’s health than we do?” he asked.
When asked if he thinks he can collect enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot, Donnely replied, “we’ll see,” maintaining that there was a “huge outpouring” of bipartisan opposition to the bill.
Donnelly’s is the first formal challenge of the law, but others are expected. Christina Hildebrand, founder of A Voice for Choice, a group opposed to SB 277, said her group would also attempt to overturn the law through a ballot referendum. She also pledged to file a lawsuit on the grounds that the bill infringes on the state constitution’s guarantee of education.
Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), who wrote SB 277 with Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), responded to Donnelly’s move by issuing a statement asserting that Californians “overwhelmingly support” requiring vaccinations for school, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California survey.
“Our bill was a reasonable, science-based approach to protecting children, and the most vulnerable among us, from dangerous diseases,” he said.
“I have spent my career campaigning to build healthier and safe communities and I will continue that work by fighting any referendum that hurts Californians,” added Pan.
==
http://www.alternet.org/culture/anti-vaxx-mother-leaves-movement-after-all-7-her-kids-get-whooping-cough
vaxxer?
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http://www.desmogblog.com/conservatives-versus-science-new-scientific-validation-republican-war-science-and-republican-brain-thesis
UPDATE: The paper discussed below is downloadable here [1].
For a while now, I’ve been aware of a powerful new paper that directly tests the central argument of my 2005 book The Republican War on Science [2]—and also validates some key claims made in my new book, The Republican Brain [3]. I’ve had to keep quiet about it until now; but at last, the study is out [4]—though I’m not sure yet about a web link to it.
The research is by Gordon Gauchat [5] of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and published in the prestigious American Sociological Review [6]. In the study, Gauchat uses a vast body of General Social Survey data to test three competing theses about the relationship between science and the U.S. public:
1) the cultural ascendancy thesis or “deficit model” view, according to which better education and engagement with science lead all boats to rise, and citizens across the board become more trusting of scientists and their expertise;
2) the alienation thesis, according to which modernity brings on distrust and disillusionment with science (call it the “spoiled brat” thesis if you’d like); and
3) the politicization thesis—my thesis—according to which some cultural groups, aka conservatives, have a unique fallout with science for reasons tied up with the nature of modern American conservatism, such as its ideology, the growth of its think tank infrastructure, and so on.
The result? Well, Gauchat’s data show that the politicization thesis handily defeats all contenders. More specifically, he demonstrates that there was only really a decline in public trust in science among conservatives in the period from 1974 to 2010 (and among those with high church attendance, but these two things are obviously tightly interrelated).
And not just that.
Gauchat further validates the argument of The Republican War on Science by showing that the decline in trust in science was not linear. It occurred in association with two key “cultural break” points that, I argue in the book, heightened right wing science politicization: The election of Ronald Reagan, and then the election of George W. Bush.
This one figure from the paper really, really says it all:
[7]
As you can see, conservatives go down, down, down in their trust in science over the period in question—which, of course, is also the period that thoroughly divided and polarized America.
And it’s not just these new findings that resound. Much of Gauchat’s data also validate key points from my new book The Republican Brain [8], which is in many ways my deeper elaboration of the arguments of the Republican War on Science.
First, Gauchat shows something I also highlight: Graduate degrees are now much more numerous among liberals, and the graduate education gap between left and right is widening. This factor–reflecting liberals’ greater Openness to scientific information and new ideas, as well as unending conservative attacks on academia (and recourse to ideological think tanks to take its place)–is a key structural force involved in driving conservatives away from science.
Second: Gauchat also captures, once again, the “smart idiot” effect [9]: Conservatives becoming more factually wrong—or, in this case, more distrusting of science, which to me is basically the same thing—as their level of education advances. Here let me quote in full, because frankly, the finding can only be called highly disturbing:
…conservatives with high school degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate degrees all experienced greater distrust in science over time and these declines are statistically significant. In addition, a comparison of predicted probabilities indicates that conservatives with college degrees decline more quickly than those with only a high school degree. These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives.
The key question to pose, after reading Gauchat’s paper, is why this occurred. Clearly, The Republican War on Science’s politicization thesis is being strongly validated—a thesis that attributes the problem to the growth of a modern conservative movement, its need to appease its core interest groups and constituencies (corporate America, conservative Christians), its need to have its own alternative expertise and journalism (think tanks, Fox, Limbaugh), and so on.
But frankly, I don’t think this thesis goes far enough. That is the whole point of The Republican Brain, where I assert that we need a nature plus nurture account to understand why conservatives deny science and reality. And all of this stuff Gauchat is talking about is sociology—aka, “nurture.” It’s very real, undeniably so–but is it the whole story?
I doubt it. For instance, in their book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics [10], Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler have shown that as the “New Right” emerged in the U.S. in the wake of the cultural battles of the 1960s and 1970s, it mobilized strong forces of authoritarianism–e.g., psychological rigidity and closed-mindedness. In this era, driven by hot button “culture war” issues, authoritarians moved to the right, leaving behind the Democratic Party, particularly in the South. These were the so-called “Reagan Democrats.”
I find it hard to believe that this trend is not also showing up in Gauchat’s data. If anything, the finding about church attendance kind of gives it away—in the U.S., authoritarians are often biblical fundamentalists.
Whatever the underlying causes, though, the punchline of the story that Gauchat tells—reaffirming the story I have told—is unmistakably grim. We now have a powerful linkage between a powerful political movement in the United States on the one hand, and the denial of science and reality on the other. This not only manifests itself every day in our dysfunctional political debates; it is a gigantic threat to the country’s future and its ability to cope with 21stcentury problems.
Tags:
republican war on science [11]
republican brain [12]
gordon gauchat [13]
Read more: Conservatives versus Science: A New Scientific Validation of the Republican War on Science (and Republican Brain) Thesis [14]
Source URL: http://www.desmogblog.com/conservatives-versus-science-new-scientific-validation-republican-war-science-and-republican-brain-thesis
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interesting convergence of anti-science; herd immunity is a version of the commons; internet meme; (goes viral ;(
understandable that DDT would be target, but harder to see why vaccine, tho JBS used to think fluride was commie plot
hdnet is AXTV rather? corrected?
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Vaccines and the Republican War on Science
Posted by Josh Rosenau on April 4, 2013
http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2013/04/04/vaccines-and-the-republican-war-on-science/
Ever since Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science was published in 2005, folks have been looking for a way to argue that Democrats are just as bad. The standard example for this counternarrative, one which Mooney even offered in his book, was vaccine denial – the claim that vaccines cause autism or are otherwise dangerous.
Intuitively, this seems right. The folks and venues touting antivaxx conspiracy theories tended to be New Agey outlets, and the places facing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases tended to be liberal strongholds, like Boulder, CO or Marin County, CA. That must mean liberals are more likely to buy into vaccine denial, right? Unfortunately, no pollster ever seemed to include a question about vaccine denial in a survey along with questions about political party or political ideology.
Until recently.
Yesterday, Public Policy Polling, an outfit known for asking wacky but surprisingly informative questions, asked people about a host of conspiracy theories. The Atlantic Wire’s Philip Bumpsummarizes the results nicely, and there’s much to return to here. For our purposes, the most interesting outcome is that 26% of Republicans think vaccines cause autism, compared to 16% of Democrats (that’s on p. 21 of the PDF).
Indeed, the only claimed conspiracies which Democrats were more likely to back than Republicans were: “the moon landing was faked” (D: 7%, R: 4%, I: 9%, all within the margin of error), “President Bush intentionally misled the public about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to promote the Iraq war” (D: 72%, R: 13%, I: 48%), “the CIA was instrumental in distributing crack cocaine into America’s inner cities in the 1980s” (D: 14%, R: 9%, I: 21%), “Paul McCartney actually died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a lookalike so The Beatles could continue” (D: 7%, R: 4% I: 5%, inside the margin of error), “the United States government knowingly allowed the attacks on September 11th, 2001, to happen” (D: 14%, R: 8%, I: 12%). Republicans are more likely to believe in aliens and in bigfoot, that aliens crashed at Roswell and shape-shifting reptiles rule our world, that Saddam Hussein played a role in 9/11 and a secretive power elite secret rules the world, that the government adds mind control messages to TV signals, sprays evil chemicals into the air, and fluoridates water for nefarious purposes, that bin Laden is alive and Oswald didn’t act alone, that pharmaceutical companies invent new diseases to make money and vaccines cause autism. They also are more likely to think President Obama is the anti-Christ and global warming is a hoax. Republicans endorse more conspiracy theories, and with greater fervor, than Democrats (even stretching back to conspiracies of yesteryear, like McCartney’s supposed death or the CIA’s ambiguous role in the Contras’ drug dealing).
According to a survey last December, Republicans aren’t just more likely to think vaccines cause autism, they are also less likely than Democrats to think “the schedule of vaccines recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services is safe.” At the time, Adam Berinsky, the researcher who commissioned the survey, suggested that Republicans’ negative reaction might simply be “a result of the interaction between anti-government sentiment among Republicans and the mention of a government agency in the question.” Yet that survey also found that Republicans were more likely to think vaccines were associated with autism, cancer, and heart disease (and less likely to link it with diabetes).
Berinsky compared those conspiratorial beliefs with another conspiracy theory, finding that people who are less trusting of the vaccine schedule are more likely to think President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. In other words, belief in one conspiracy seems to predispose you to others. Democrats who were more dubious of the vaccination schedule were also more likely to doubt that the President was born where all evidence indicates he was born. This parallels findings from Australian researchers including Stephan Lewandowsky, who found thatpeople who endorsed conspiracy theories like the CIA assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr., or NASA faking the moon landing are more likely to reject climate change. (Lewandowsky’s paper itself inspired such a fury of conspiracy-mongering that he was able to generate another paper about the conspiracy theories spawned by the first.)
I wrote to Berinsky to ask whether he’d compared vaccine denial with other conspiracy theories, like creationism or climate change denial, and he was able to make a comparison with climate change denial. “As you would expect,” he told me, “anti-vaccine people are climate change deniers.”
That’s what you’d expect from the evidence that conspiracy-mongering begets conspiracy-mongering. It’s not what you’d expect if you shoehorn vaccine denial into the role of a liberal counterpart to conservative science denial.
==
s mercer mojo
So Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) is finally retiring, after two decades in Congress. He's got a notable record of craziness, having doggedly pursued President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal while knowing full well he'd had an affair himself and even fathered a child out of wedlock. He famously claimed to have shot up a "head-like object" (likely a melon or a pumpkin) to try to re-create the alleged "murder" of former Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, who committed suicide. But Burton doesn't get enough credit for what may be his lasting legacy: helping turn Americans away from life-saving childhood vaccines.
Burton has said he believes one of his grandchildren became autistic after receiving a childhood vaccination. As a result, he spent many years and lots of congressional resources trying to investigate the alleged link between the two. In 2000, he held a circus-like hearing in which he provided a very high profile platform for the now entirely disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who helped spawn the myth that vaccines cause autism. Wakefield has since lost his medical license for allegedly falsifying the medical histories of the children he claimed had gotten autism from vaccines, among other issues.
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Michael Specter's new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, dives into a worrisome strain of modern life -- a vocal anti-science bias that may prevent us from making the right choices for our future. Specter studies how the active movements against vaccines, genetically engineered food, science-based medicine and biotechnological solutions to climate change may actually put the world at risk. (For instance, anti-vaccination activists could soon trigger the US return of polio, not to mention the continuing rise of measles.) More insidiously, the chilling effect caused by the new denialism may prevent useful science from being accomplished.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/michael_specter
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http://www.dailykos.com/news/american%20thinker#
eg http://www.dailykos.com/news/Randall%20Hoven vaccine
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http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com/Anti-Vaccine_Body_Count/Anti-Vaccine_History.html
http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/26/jenny-mccarthy-vaccine-expert-a-quarter-of-parents-trust-celebrities/
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5/14 vaccine and autism (2nd suggestion for vaccine)
About 5,100,000 results (0.28 seconds)
Scholarly articles for vaccines and autism
Vaccines and autism - ?DeStefano - Cited by 8
Vaccines and autism - ?Offit - Cited by 4
Vaccines and autism: a tale of shifting hypotheses - ?Plotkin - Cited by 113
A worldwide increase in the rate of autism diagnoses—likely driven by broadened diagnostic criteria and increased awareness—has fueled concerns that an environmental exposure like vaccines might cause autism. Theories for this putative association have centered on the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, thimerosal, and the large number of vaccines currently administered. However, both epidemiological and biological studies fail to support these claims.
On 28 February 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, and colleagues [1] published a paper in The Lancet that described 8 children whose first symptoms of autism appeared within 1 month after receiving an MMR vaccine. All 8 of these children had gastrointestinal symptoms and signs and lymphoid nodular hyperplasia revealed on endoscopy. From these observations, Wakefield postulated that MMR vaccine caused intestinal inflammation that led to translocation of usually nonpermeable peptides to the bloodstream and, subsequently, to the brain, where they affected development.
Several issues undermine the interpretation by Wakefield et al. [1] of this case series. First, the self-referred cohort did not include control subjects, which precluded the authors from determining whether the occurrence of autism following receipt of MMR vaccine was causal or coincidental....
Search Results
CDC - Concerns About Autism - Vaccine Safety
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United States Centers for Disease Control and Preve...
Mar 26, 2014 - Concerns about thimerosal vaccines leading to autism.
?
Vaccine not associated with ... - ?IOM Report on Adverse Effects
Autism-Vaccine Link: Evidence Doesn't Dispel Doubts
www.webmd.com/brain/autism/searching-for.../vaccines-autism?
WebMD
Many major medical groups say vaccines don't cause autism. Many parents say they do. So who's right?
Vaccines and Autism - Autism Speaks
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Autism Speaks
Many studies have examined possible links between vaccination and increased prevalence of autism. This research has paid particular attention to the ...
News for vaccines and autism
The Guardian
State of Confusion: One-Third of American Parents Continue ...
Huffington Post ?- 3 days ago
We must not allow anti-vaccination rhetoric to undermine these ... One-Third of American Parents Continue to Link Vaccines and Autism.
How vaccine denialism in the West is causing measles ...
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More news for vaccines and autism
MMR vaccine controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Wikipedia
The scientific consensus is that no evidence links the vaccine to the development ofautism, and that the vaccine's benefits greatly outweigh its risks. Following ...
Vaccines and autism: Separating fact from fiction | BabyCenter
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BabyCenter
Did a preservative in children's vaccines cause a rise in autism rates? We examine the evidence.
Vaccines & Autism « Science-Based Medicine
www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/reference/vaccines-and-autism/?
Overview of Vaccines & Autism. Vaccines are generally considered to be the most successful public health intervention ever devised. And yet there have been ...
22 Medical Studies That Show Vaccines Can Cause Autism
www.activistpost.com/2013/.../22-medical-studies-that-show-vaccines.ht...?
Sep 12, 2013 - Regardless of the MMR vaccine and autism debate, there are still a number of studies that link vaccines to a possible autism connection.
MMR Vaccine & Autism - American Academy of Pediatrics
https://www2.aap.org/.../mmr.html?
American Academy Of Pediatrics
Studies conducted in the US and Europe have found no association between the MMRvaccine and autism. Over the years, the Institute of Medicine and the AAP ...
Autism and Vaccines - Autism Science Foundation
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The results of studies are very clear; the data show no relationship between vaccines and autism. Read the studies themselves below and browse our ...
In-depth articles
How to Think About the Risk of Autism
The New York Times - Mar 2014
Yet most media coverage focuses on vaccines, which do not causeautism and are given after birth. How can we help people separate real risks from false rumors? Over the last few ...
Explore: autism genetic
Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On ...
Discover - May 2009
Research has soundly disproved the alleged connection, yet fears aboutvaccines continue to be a major risk to public health.
Explore: vaccine controversy
Jim Carrey: The Judgment on Vaccines Is In???
huffingtonpost.com - Apr 2009
Can we afford to ignore vaccines as a possible cause of rising numbers of children with Autism, when they are one of the fastest growing elements in our children's environment?
Explore: anti vaccination
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Anti-vaxxers are latching onto the coronavirus pandemic to bolster their movement
Written by Kaiser Health News April 25, 2020
While most of the world hungers for a vaccine to put an end to the death and economic destruction wrought by COVID-19, some anti-vaccine groups are joining with anti-lockdown protesters to challenge restrictions aimed at protecting public health.
Vaccine critics suffered serious setbacks in the past year, as states strengthened immunization laws in response to measles outbreaks sparked by vaccine refusers. California tightened its vaccine requirements last fall despite protests during which anti-vaccine activists threw blood on state senators, assaulted the vaccine bill’s sponsor and shut down the legislature.
Now, many of these same vaccine critics are joining a fight against stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns intended to stem the spread of the coronavirus, which had killed more than 47,000 Americans as of Thursday afternoon.
“This is just a fresh coat of paint for the anti-vaccine movement in America, and an exploitative means for them to try to remain relevant,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Hotez said anti-vaccine groups are seizing on the anti-government sentiment stoked by conservative-leaning protesters to advance their cause.
“Unfortunately, their strategy may work.”
A group calling itself the Freedom Angels, whose members last year stood on chairs and chanted at public hearings on the California vaccine bill, say governors are abusing their power by shutting down gun shops and other businesses.
Many anti-vaccine activists — who have claimed that diseases such as measles aren’t that serious — now contend the coronavirus isn’t dangerous enough to justify staying home. They agree with President Donald Trump that the “cure” for the pandemic could be worse than the disease itself.
That’s led some vaccine foes to join the protesters — whom Trump has encouraged on Twitter — in staging demonstrations in state capitals to “reopen America.”
“This is the time for people to take notice and really evaluate the freedoms they’re giving up, all in the name of perceived safety,” said Freedom Angels co-founder Heidi Munoz Gleisner in a Facebook video.
The group organized a Monday rally in Sacramento called “Operation Gridlock.”
“People need to get back to work, get back to life, get back into contact with their loved ones who they’re isolated from, they need to be able to have a paycheck,” group co-founder Tara Thornton told The Sacramento Bee, which interviewed her during the demonstration. “This is the grounds they will enslave us upon.”
Freedom Angels did not respond to requests for interviews. The group’s website mentions plans for additional rallies and includes photos from Monday’s demonstration, such as one in which a protester holds a sign proclaiming “No Mandatory Vaccines.”
But after the Monday event, the California Highway Patrol announced it had revoked the group’s permit for future protests because the gathering — which included dozens of people — violated the governor’s social distancing order. The highway patrol has now banned all group events at the Capitol during the pandemic to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
A big tent
The anti-vaccine movement has never been limited to one political party. Left-leaning vaccine critics — such as Children’s Health Defense, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — include environmentalists who are suspicious of chemical pollutants, corporations and “Big Pharma.” The Kennedy group’s website attacks Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for rushing “risky and uncertain coronavirus vaccines” into development as part of a “sweetheart deal” for drug companies.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many anti-vaccine conservatives oppose state immunization requirements because they distrust “big government.”
A group called Texans for Vaccine Choice has called on the governor to promise that no one will be forced to get a coronavirus vaccine in order to go to work or school.
Posts on the Facebook page of Californians for Health Choice, which also opposed California’s vaccine laws, question stay-at-home orders and accuse government officials of refusing to admit the orders are a mistake.
In a video on the Freedom Angels’ Facebook page, its founders describe stay-at-home orders as an abuse of government authority, and the closure of California gun shops as an assault on the Second Amendment. The group notes that guns could be essential for protection from rioters and looters looking to steal food during the pandemic.
In many ways, the conservative arm of the anti-vaccine movement is a natural ally for those leading “reopen America” rallies, said Dr. David Gorski, an oncologist and managing editor of the Science-Based Medicine site. Both harbor suspicions about government authority.
Vaccine critics, for example, have long championed the false claim that vaccines cause autism, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tried to cover up that information, Gorski said. Trump has at times linked vaccines with autism, although he came out strongly in favor of vaccinations during the 2019 measles epidemic.
Anti-vaccine groups are now rebranding themselves as advocates of “medical freedom.”
Protests against social distancing began in Michigan but have spread to state capitols in Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Maryland, Wisconsin and elsewhere, with more planned. Most protests have been small, limited to a few hundred or fewer people.
Yet the anti-vaccine movement doesn’t speak for everyone on the right.
Stephen Moore, the senior economic contributor for FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group that has been helping publicize the protests, said he’s unfamiliar with the Freedom Angels or their rallies.
“I’m personally pro-vaccine,” said Moore, a member of the White House council to reopen the economy. “Especially when it comes to coronavirus.”
And some heroes of the anti-vaccine movement say they support coronavirus lockdowns.
Dr. Jay Gordon, a Santa Monica, California, pediatrician popular among vaccine foes for downplaying the risks of measles, said the risk of COVID-19 is real. Gordon said he approves of the lockdown, “and we have to keep it up.”
Containing the pandemic
Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and California state senator who has championed stronger vaccine mandates, described anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protesters as “essentially selfish” because they put other people at risk.
“One of the hallmarks of the anti-vaccine movement is this sense of selfishness and lack of concern for other people’s health,” Pan said. “They like to talk about rights and freedom. But what they really want is freedom without consequences.”
Both anti-vaccine parents and those who want to relax social distancing assume that the medical system will come to their rescue if they become sick, said Pan, who noted that thousands of health care workers have died while fighting the pandemic.
Fauci has said that relaxing stay-at-home orders is dangerous as long as the virus — for which there are no approved treatments or vaccines — is actively spreading. Reopening businesses too soon could spark a second wave of infections.
More than 75 companies and research groups worldwide are trying to develop vaccines, which are seen as a key weapon against the novel coronavirus.
In the meantime, the CDC says that social distancing measures — such as working from home and avoiding large gatherings — are critical to slowing the spread of the coronavirus and preventing patients from overwhelming hospitals. Health leaders say it won’t be safe to reopen the county until widespread testing shows the coronavirus has died down.
Americans overwhelmingly support vaccination, according to surveys, and polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 80% of Americans want lockdowns to continue. Only 19% said social distancing orders placed an unnecessary burden on the economy. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Neither the anti-vaccine nor anti-lockdown demonstrators represent the opinions of most Americans, Pan said.
“Let’s put this movement into proper context,” he said. “They’re loud, they’re noisy and they’re small.”
The mechanisms that once made democracy possible have withered and died. We no longer have elections free of corporate control; real legislative debate; an independent press rooted in verifiable fact that lifts up the voices and concerns of the citizens rather than peddling conspiracy theories such as “Russiagate” or cheerleading for disastrous military interventions and occupations; academic institutions that vigorously examine and critique the nature of power; or diplomacy, negotiation, détente and compromise. Puffed up by self-importance, intoxicated by the ability to wield police and military power, despots and their grotesque courtiers are freed with the collapse of the rule of law to carry out endless vendettas against enemies real and imagined until their own paranoia and fear define the lives of those they subjugate. This is where we have come, not because of Trump, who is the grotesque product of our failed democracy, but because the institutions that were designed to prevent tyranny no longer function.
Ignorance has lost its innocence and is no longer synonymous with the absence of knowledge. It has become malicious in its refusal to know, to disdain criticism, and render invisible important social issues that lie on the side of social and economic justice. James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in “No Name in the Street” that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
As is well known, President Trump’s ignorance lights up the Twitter landscape almost every day. He denies climate change along with the dangers that it poses to humanity, shuts down the government because he cannot get the funds for his wall — a grotesque symbol of nativism — and heaps disdain on the heads of his intelligence agencies because they provide proof of the lies and misinformation that shapes his love affair with tyrants. This kind of power-drunk ignorance is comparable to a bomb with a fuse that is about to explode in a crowded shopping center. Ignorance now fuses with a reckless use of state power that holds both human life and the planet hostage. Under such circumstances, thinking becomes dangerous and becomes the object of organized disgust for any vestige of the truth.
However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy and the shrinking of political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.” Moreover, the very conditions that enable people to make informed decisions are under siege as schools are defunded, media becomes more corporatized, oppositional journalists are killed, and reality TV becomes the model for mass entertainment. Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance and the compassionate imagination. In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls “ethicide” and Joshua Sperling defines as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping."
After decades of the neoliberal nightmare both in the United States and abroad, the mobilizing passions of fascism have been unleashed unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. The ruling elite and managers of extreme capitalism have used the crises of economic inequality and immigration and what Paul Gilroy has called its “manifestly brutal and exploitative arrangements” to sow social divisions and resurrect the discourse of racial cleansing and white supremacy. In doing so, they have tapped into the growing collective suffering and anxieties of millions in order to redirect their anger and despair through a culture of fear and discourse of dehumanization; they have also turned critical ideas to ashes by disseminating a toxic mix of racialized categories, ignorance and a militarized spirit of white nationalism.
In this instance, neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the exploitative values and cruel austerity policies of “casino capitalism” with fascist ideals. These ideals include the veneration of war, anti-intellectualism, dehumanization, a populist celebration of ultra-nationalism and racial purity, the suppression of freedom and dissent, a culture of lies, a politics of hierarchy, the spectacularization of emotion over reason, the weaponization of language, a discourse of decline, and state violence in heterogeneous forms. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past and the conditions that produce its central assumptions are with us once again, ushering in a period of modern barbarity that appears to be reaching towards homicidal extremes, especially in the United States.
The deep grammar of violence now shapes all aspects of cultural production and becomes visceral in its ongoing generation of domestic terrorism, mass shootings, the mass incarceration of people of color and the war on undocumented immigrants. Not only has it become more gratuitous, random and in some cases trivialized through the monotony of repetition, it has also become the official doctrine of the Trump administration in shaping its domestic and security policies. Trump’s violence has become both promiscuous in its reach and emboldening in its nod to right-wing extremist groups. The mix of white nationalism and expansion of policies that benefit the rich, big corporations and the financial elite are increasingly legitimated and normalized in a new political formation that I have termed neoliberal fascism.
The urgency of addressing the rise of fascism both in the United States and abroad might begin with the regime of untruth and manufactured illiteracy that allows and normalizes the catastrophic conditions that make neoliberal fascism a potent source of identity, fantasy and pleasure. One place to start would be a critical analysis of the Trump administration’s efforts to abandon and discredit traditional sources of evidence, facts and analysis in its attempt to normalize fake news, a culture of lying and the world of alternative facts. At issue here is making visible a radical new relationship between the public and truth and the ensuing demise of civic culture and the public institutions that make it possible. As the public’s grip on civic literacy weakens, language is emptied of any substantive meaning and the shared standards necessary for developing informed judgments and sustained convictions are undermined. In a world where nothing is true, all that is left to choose from are competing fictions. One consequence is that everything begins to look like a lie.
As the historian Timothy Snyder points out, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” More startling is the assumption that what matters in an age of deep divisions, exploitation and precarity is not whether something is true or false but the promise of a consistent narrative which calls upon people to commit to a newfound sense of unity while willing to “abolish their capacity for distinguishing between the truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.” Of course, there is more at stake here than the creation and normalization of a culture of lying and what Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others identified as the theatricalization and aestheticization of politics. There is also the threat to democracy itself.
The entrepreneurs of hate are no longer confined to the dustbin of history, particularly the proto-fascist era of 1930s and 1940s. They are with us once again, producing dystopian fantasies out of the decaying communities produced by 40 years of a savage capitalism. White male rage has emerged out of the destruction of social bonds and the gutting of the welfare state and intensified with the neoliberal unleashing of destructive energies of “deracination, displacement, and disintegration.” Angry white male loners looking for a cause, a place to put their agency into play, are fodder for cult leaders. They have found one in Trump, for whom the relationship between the language of fascism and its toxic worldview of “blood and soil” and the “fear of inferior blood” has moved to the center of power in the United States.
Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture, as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and most of the Republican Party in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public is addicted to extreme violence and shock, which allow them to drown in overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Unsurprisingly, education in the larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance that now plays a central role in the formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted the ideologies, policies and institutions that are crucial to a substantive and thriving democracy.
I am not talking about the kind of anti-intellectualism that has a long history in the United States. I am pointing to a more lethal form of ignorance fueled by a manufactured type of illiteracy that is often ignored. What I am referring to is a mode of illiteracy that is both a scourge and a political tool power designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right to state that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.” Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest.
Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence. And so it goes. The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.
The writer and social critic Gore Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia. The title should be extended to the United States of Amnesia and Willful Illiteracy. Illiteracy no longer simply marks populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is about what it means not to be able to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment and critical agency.
In this instance, manufactured illiteracy has become a form of political repression that discourages a culture of questioning, renders agency inoperable as an act of intervention, and restages power as a mode of domination. Illiteracy serves to depoliticize people because it reproduces conditions that make it difficult for individuals to develop informed judgments, analyze complex relationships and draw upon a range of sources to understand how power works and how they might be able to shape the forces that bear down on their lives.
Think about the defunding of public education or the assault on truth and civic literacy by the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Jair Bolsonaro administration in Brazil. Illiteracy provides the foundation for being governed, not how to govern. It is precisely this mode of illiteracy that now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, propaganda machines and the need for instant gratification. This mode of manufactured illiteracy and education has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship.
It is important to recognize that the rise of this new mode of illiteracy is not simply about the failure of public and higher education to create critical and active citizens; it is about a society that eliminates those public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. Literacy is dangerous to tyrants because they recognize that it is not only about learning critical competencies and an essential step towards agency, it is also the precondition for intervening in the world by being able to critique common-sense assumptions that legitimate apparatuses of persuasion and power. In the absence of a culture of literacy, the preconditions disappear for confronting not only the crisis of memory, ethics and agency but also the crisis of democracy itself.
At a time of growing fascist movements across the globe, power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. As cultural apparatuses are concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich and major tech companies, the educative force of culture has taken on a powerful anti-democratic turn. This can be seen in the rise of new digitally driven systems of production and consumption that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and social relations that contribute to the disintegration of democratic social bonds and promote a form of social Darwinism in which misfortune is seen as a weakness and the Hobbesian rule of “war of all against all” replaces any vestige of shared responsibility and compassion for others. Think of the power of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as an anti-democratic disimagination machine, especially in its ability to influence the Trump presidency.
The era of post-truth is in reality a period of crisis which, as Antonio Gramsci observed, “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and that] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Those morbid symptoms are evident in Trump’s mainstreaming of a fascist politics in which there is an attempt to normalize the language of racial purification, the politics of disposability and social sorting while exaggerating a culture of fear and a militarism reminiscent of past and current dictatorships.
I want to argue that any viable attempt at developing a radical politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy and what I have termed public pedagogy, or more precisely the educational force of the wider culture, as central not only to politics but also to the creation of subjects capable of becoming individual and social agents willing to struggle against injustices and fight to reclaim and develop those institutions crucial to the functioning and promises of a substantive democracy. One place to begin to think through such a project is by addressing the meaning and role of pedagogy as part of the broader struggle for economic justice and practice of freedom.
The reach of pedagogy extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, the expanding digital screen culture, and alternative old and new media outlets. Accordingly, pedagogy is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives. Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using media establishments and public and higher education to reproduce the corporate-driven culture of neoliberalism. In addition, they are waging an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, public schools, unions, feminist organizations and social services, among others, all the while undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.
As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish — from public schools and alternative media to health care centers — there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a “failed sociality” — a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice.
One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, progressives and other cultural workers is the need to address the role they might play in educating students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish not simply in a democracy but at a historical moment when society is about to slip into the dark night of authoritarianism. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?
henry girouux
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see pundit? neo-con? "often wrong, never in doubt?
https://www.alternet.org/were-america-btch-white-house-allies-detail-trump-administrations-fck-obama-doctrine
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denialism