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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again.
President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.
Mother Jones’s David Corn reported on the findings of The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis which found that senior Trump officials tried to block CDC scientists from warning the public and barred them from holding press conferences as would be the usual protocol, subsitituting those demented Trump TV briefings instead. The White House listened to conspiracy theorists and unorthodox quacks with little experience in the field and leaned on the CDC to change its recommendations. The result of Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the days before the vaccines became widely available.
We all recall Trump’s cult followers’ reaction to the government guidelines to try to save as many lives as possible. They rebelled like wild-eyed teenagers, burning facemasks, staging protests, indulging in conspiracy theories and Trump followed their lead, especially since it dovetailed with his own political needs to get out on the campaign trail. The consequences were grave. Vaccine refusal caused over 200,000 more unnecessary deaths.
Trump has not forgotten about any of that even if the rest of us have tried to suppress the sense of insecurity and chaos that crisis left us with. He is a man who bears grudges and the scientific community that disagreed with him is in his crosshairs. He cannot accept that they were right and he was wrong and he’s going to make them pay.
He found the perfect instrument for his revenge in Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist with a whole lot of crackpot ideas but who, like Trump, believes that he knows better than scientists. He apparently was responsible for some of the funding for the dangerous documentary called “Plandemic” which brainwashed a whole lot of people and probably contributed to many deaths.
His left field theories about vaccines and other standard life-saving medical treatments are well documented and despite his alleged commitment to changing the food Americans eat to make them more healthy (good luck with that) it’s fair to assume that his lack of ability at being anything but a gadlfly will likely result in chaos rather than reform. His previous efforts have been deadly.
To the extent there are any scientists he or Trump respect they are all heretical and eccentric. Trump named a group of those very scientists this week to top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers For Disease Control. They were all opponents of the standard COVID guidelines and are all opponents of mainstream medical science, notably in opposition to vaccines.
Trump has nominated Dr. David Weldon an internist and former congressman from Florida to head the C.D.C. He is best known for pushing the thoroughly discredited theory that thimerosal, a preservative compound in some vaccines, causes autism. He’s a fanatic who tried ,as a congressman, to pass a “vaccine safety bill” in 2007 to create a separate agency for vaccines within HHS.
Dr. Martin Makary a pancreatic surgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is Trump’s choice to head the F.D.A. He questions some of the vaccines routinely given to children and in his Fox News appearances he’s made it clear that he’s opposed to the COVID policies. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it would be gone by April of 2021 due to natural immunity and vaccines. He was very wrong. More than 450,000 people died in 2021.
For Surgeon General he’s named Dr. Janette Nesheiwat a frequent Fox News contributor and supplement salesperson who also happens to be married to his new National Security Adviser, Florida Rep. Michael Walz. She has a book coming out called , “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine,” which shows the “transformative power of prayer.” The good news is that she doesn’t seem to be hostile to vaccines which makes her an island in a sea of anti-vaxxers.
Trump hasn’t formally nominated anyone to the National Institute of Health but the smart money is on Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University-trained physician and economist. Apparently RFK Jr vetted him this week and really liked the cut of his jib. Of course, he would. Battacharya is one of the lead authors of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdowns during the pandemic. It was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial, which gives you some idea of the kind of “scientific” analysis went into it. The Washington Post reported:
Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that constitute NIH, saying that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent. Bhattacharya and other critics have singled out Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centers for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022. […]
Bhattacharya and Makary collaborated on a blueprint for a proposed commission to investigate the nation’s coronavirus response.
They have friends in high places:
It appears that Trump is intent upon stacking the nation’s most important health agencies with people who are hostile to modern public health science and vaccines, which is exactly what you would expect from a vengeful megalomaniac who’s put an anti-vaxx conspiracy nut in charge of them.
The pandemic did an immeasurable amount of damage and caused endless heartache for millions of families around the world. Here in America it was taken up as a political weapon by the right wing and will be the catalyst for the destruction of our public health system. We may be through with COVID but it still isn’t through with us.
Good news, bad news this morning
First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight:
After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser.
And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass. Opponents of abortion rights fully prevailed only in Nebraska and South Dakota.
So the right ginned up other bogeymen with which to frighten and activate their base and drive them to the polls: immigrants and transgender people. Even so, Trump’s narrow popular-vote margin wasn’t enough to justify “apocalyptic electoral analysis,” Dionne argues.
The right will, of course. And a left still licking its wounds over the election outcome doesn’t exactly feel celebratory. The economy and immigration worked better for Trump than the defense of democracy and women’s rights worked for Kamala Harris. Immigration and trans issues simply lit a hotter, brighter fire under Trump voters even if, as my post below explains, trans people are but 1% of the population. People perceive them as scary Others constituting a threatening 20-plus percent of the population.
The bad news comes from Jason Statler (LOLGOP):
“We can have democracy, or we can have billionaires. Not both. At least with these campaign finance laws,” he writes. The problem is that the billionaires are winning. They are drowning democracy in a flood of dollars:
Just 400 mega-donors outspent every other contributor to the Republican Party based on what we know about the spending in the 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone appears to have outspent every small donor to the Trump campaign. And that’s if you don’t count the multiple billions of dollars he put into the $44 billion he wrangled to purchase Twitter and turn it into a Trump campaign website. In return, Tesla has skyrocketed 40% since Trump’s election, making Elon about $70 billion he can blow on future elections.
And the way that Elon spent degraded democracy itself. His PAC drowned targeted voters with disinformation of the sort tens of millions are now fleeing from on Twitter.
It’s not a fair fight. But then, the right doesn’t believe in fair:
It’s the billionaires versus the people, and the billionaires are kicking our ass with Elon—and his grudge against his daughter and the culture that accepts her in a way he never can—leading the way. His Phishing Scam Approach to politics has helped him, officially the richest human being ever to live, to become significantly richer.
Many factors have made America the most unequal country in the OECD and now threaten our ability to govern ourselves.
He continues:
There is an obvious solution. We need to take our own side against the billionaires. We must stop behaving like “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” who are just one video or startup from getting high and playing Halo II with Elon.
There are more of us than there will ever be of them. But that only matters if we have a democracy where it’s even possible for us to fight for our interests.
A massive barrier in this fight is that Democrats feel they need their billionaires to fight the other billionaires. This “choose your fighter” strategy has proven to be a failed one. We will never be able to offer these moguls what they want—minimal taxes on the rich, no consumer protections, and an end to our votes mattering.
So, we need a progressive movement that can take the people’s side. The billionaires are activated. We no longer need to fear them turning on us and our Constitution. It’s happened. They sided with an insurrectionist who has made it clear he intends to rule as a dictator and will refuse ever to leave office peacefully. That’s done.
Now, we need to have the debate that matters most: do we want a democracy or billionaires? Because we can’t have both. Not like this.
I’d quibble some with taking our own side against billionaires being an obvious solution. Poorer people believing themselves “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” is a cultural myth dating from before Horatio Alger. It’s sustained by the monied class to keep the poors supporting nonsense like trickle-down economics and buying state lottery tickets in lieu of their organizing unions to rebalance the power dynamics in this country.
It’s not a viewpoint one can just turn off by telling the poors there are more of us than there are of them. Why do you think the less-well-off adopted as their champion a billionaire who would never admit them to his country club?
They don’t hate him. They want to be him. Immune from prosecution, unbound by any rule, truly free to be the biggest asshole in any room and to kick away the ladder behind you. Kicking the downtrodden and making money from it? That’s real freedom, baby.
They learned more from a four-hour Trump rally than they ever learned in Sunday school.
Are they out to get you? Who they?
During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First, the results of a YouGov poll on how people perceive what percentage of the population various groups constitute:
The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:
- Transgender: 21 percent
- Muslim: 27 percent
- Jewish: 30 percent
- Black: 41 percent
- Live in New York City: 30 percent
- Gay or lesbian: 30 percent
We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?
Now, the actual numbers:
- Transgender: 1 percent
- Muslim: 1 percent
- Jewish: 2 percent
- Black: 12 percent
- Live in New York City: 2 percent1
- Gay or lesbian: 3 percent
We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.
People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”
I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.
These perceptions are conclusions drawn from little or no actual encounters in real life with trans people, gay people, Muslims, etc. Yet people assume these Others are everywhere.
Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche, long haunted by paranoid fantasies, whether it’s savages in the woods or commies in woodpiles.
This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.
Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.
And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.
“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.
I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:
I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.
The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.
Update: shortened for brevity, fair use.
James Fallows has written a fascinating piece for Wired (temporarily out from under the paywall)about California and the future that I hope you will read with an open mind. An excerpt:
California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.
Never mind that one in every eight Americans still lives in California—a population larger than 21 other US states combined—and that its economic output is bigger than any entire non-US country except China, Japan, or Germany, and that it’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.
As a Californian who has spent most of his life in other parts of the United States, and as an American who has lived for more than a dozen years in other parts of the world, I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.
“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said. That goes for huge cultural and demographic shifts (California was the first mainland US state whose diverse population became “majority-minority,” back in the 1990s, a full generation ago) and for era-defining crises, self-inflicted and not. And most importantly, it also goes for solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world, with a leverage no other state possesses.
Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).
It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.
[…]
California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.
I urge you to read the whole thing while it’s still beyond the paywall. It’s really good and should provide at least a modicum of hope that despite the destruction Trump is about to unleash there is another vision.
It’s not that California doesn’t have problems. It has all the problems everyone else has and often shows the new problems before the rest of the country. It’s spawned the era of the tech bro libertarians that has become a blight on all of us. But because of its massive population, resources, wealth and talent, it also often shows the path out of it.
I live here and I didn’t know the half of it. It’s reassuring. If we can get through this perilous period without an unrecov erable catastrophe, there is hope.
Fallows concludes:
The story of America involves continued rediscovery of its potential. That is the story of the most American state as well. “I’d give anything to trade for America’s problems,” a senior Chinese bureaucrat told me in 2008, when I was living in Beijing and the United States seemed to be in free fall. America had emergencies; China, he explained, had more threatening long-term weaknesses—as has become clear in the years since then. As I write, America’s immediate political prospects are uncertain. But however this year’s election turns out—with a president who was born in California, or with a California girding itself to show that it still represents the future—the state demands attention for its many innovations, and not just its travails.
In case you were wondering why all these people involved in sexual assault are being chosen for the Trump administration, this is why. And it is why those fucked up, incel bros voted for him:
He “tells it like it is” — that they were asking for it. And he’s right that for millenia some men have told themselves that.
Now read the Pete Hegseth police report. Listen to Matt Gaetz defend himself. It’s all a version of the same thing. When you’re a star you can get away with it. And Trump and his miserable, garbage cabinet and staff are proving it.
Timothy Snyder lays out the case against Pete Hegseth. It’s worse than you think:
1. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, has no qualifications for the job. He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise.
2. Hegseth has zero notion of which other countries might threaten America or how. In his books this is simply not a subject, beyond a few clichés.
3. Hegseth does not believe in alliances. For him, “NATO is a great example of dumb globalism.”
4. Hegseth wants a political army that bans women from combat roles, is purged of “cowardly generals,” and is anti-woke.
5. Hegseth never notes that the politicized Russian army meets all of his standards perfectly, but is is ineffective and commits war crimes.
6. Hegseth never notes that the Ukrainian army, which does have women in combat, and is not politicized in the way he would like, has overperformed.
7. Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it.
8. Hegseth’s misogynist gender politics are consistent with his polygamy and the accusations of rape.
9. Hegseth’s enemies are all internal: the Left, Muslims, and immigrants. He repeatedly claims that the Left wishes to annihilate everyone else, which is a call to violence.
10. Hegseth, a Christian Reconstructionist, believes that Americans should be governed not by law or by the Constitution but by God — as interpreted of course by Hegseth and his friends.
11. Hegseth calls for a “holy war” and a “crusade” against Americans who think differently than he does because “God wills it.” Trump is the pretext: Hegseth wants “to make crusade great again.”
12. Hegseth, according to his books, could be counted upon to ignore threats to America from abroad, and to use a purged and politicized military against “enemies within.” This is consistent with Trump’s avowed intention to build a kind of dictatorship on the ruins of a dysfunctional government.
13. Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change. Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.
People like Hegseth who have half-baked ideas based upon superficial reading of history are all over the place. Sometimes I am one of them. But people like that should not be put in charge of anything as important as the US Military. The danger lies in the egomania that compels him to accept such a position despite his totally unqualified background and experience. Hegseth is someone who does not believe that war crimes should be crimes. He is a violent sexual assaulter. He is, in other words, a violent man, possibly a sociopath.
I can easily see him and the enablers around him doing some truly terrible things because they are too ignorant of the consequences and have no restraint. People like that often do something destructive simply because they don’t have the imagination or the know-how to do anything different.
This one worries me greatly.
Via Mediaite:
Gorka opened the video saying “I knew this day would come, but I didn’t expect it so soon,” crowing about Trump’s order allowing Attorney General Bill Barr to declassify information about the 2016 election.
“The Kraken has been unleashed,” Gorka declared in his signature affected bellow. “Watch, in the next two days, the rats, the hyenas, start to eat each other.”
A large light source appears to be placed behind the camera for Gorka’s monologue, overexposing the video which seems to be inspired by villainous monologues from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
If you’re unfamiliar with this fruitcake:
Sebastian Gorka, the pugilistic commentator who leveraged fears about Islam as a threat to Western civilization into a short-lived role in the first Trump administration, is poised for a second run inside the White House.
Gorka was tapped to serve as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, president-elect Donald Trump said Friday night. Previously, Gorka was an adviser on national security matters for Trump for seven months until his abrupt exit.
The role, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, will position Gorka to provide counsel and input on issues he has focused on for years, including hard-line approaches on militant groups and immigration. But if his previous role at the Trump administration is any indication, he is poised to ruffle feathers even among reverent Trump loyalists and other Republicans, who have described him as fringe and underqualified, more suited to riff in cable news green rooms than guide policy in the Oval Office.
Ya think??? Here’s another primer on his background. (Spoiler alert: He’s just as nutty as RFK Jr and a great deal more openly bloodthirsty.) Not that anyone with a brain would need to see anything other than that insane video to know he shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred miles of the White House.
He was pushed out in the first term and couldn’t get a security clearance. Trump is bypassing all security clearances in this term so he’s back, largely, I would assume, because of that video not in spite of it. That kind of loyalty will not go unrewarded. I’m just surprised Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn haven’t been tapped. Yet.
This is a good first clue that Trump has no intention of even pretending to follow the law this time. And why should he? He knows he has immunity:
President-elect Donald J. Trump is keeping secret the names of the donors who are funding his transition effort, a break from tradition that could make it impossible to see what interest groups, businesses or wealthy people are helping launch his second term.Mr. Trump has so far declined to sign an agreement with the Biden administration that imposes strict limits on that fund-raising in exchange for up to $7.2 million in federal funds earmarked for the transition. By dodging the agreement, Mr. Trump can raise unlimited amounts of money from unknown donors to pay for the staff, travel and office space involved in preparing to take over the government.
Mr. Trump is the first president-elect to sidestep the restrictions, provoking alarm among ethics experts.
Those seeking to curry favor with the incoming administration now have the opportunity to donate directly to the winning candidate without their names or potential conflicts ever entering the public sphere. And unlike with campaign contributions, foreign nationals are allowed to donate to the transition.
Trump can also keep any unspent money that’s collected. Sweet.
This is way beyond the “appearance of conflict of interest” it’s the blatant appearance of corruption and considering Trump’s history, it’s almost certainly exactly that. Between the Truth Social and Bitcoin scams where people can “invest” in his money losing schemes for the purpose of currying favor, the second Trump administration is going to be a free-for-all. He will literally be running his cons right out of the oval office and no one will say a word because they are terrified he’s going to exercise his immunity and pardon power to destroy them.
That sounds hyperbolic I know. But ask yourself, “who’s going to stop him,?”
Is this a funciton of people turning off the news? If so, maybe we should turn it back on…
Mandate? Looks like it …
46% not motivated? That’s a bad sign:
Maybe people are just tired. I’ll refrain from freaking out for a while on that one. But I’m worried that he’s so fully normalized that most people won’t react at all to what he does:
Will this matter or will everyone ust move on to the next thing?
Pay no attention to the partisanship when you analyze whether or not “economic anxiety” is the explanation for election outcomes, especially GOP partisanship. Obviously, that’s completely meaningless.
The Cabinet:
Note that more than half the people think they should be loyal to Trump. Slowly but surely it’s happening…
Only a little over 50% approve of Trump’s tariffs. But this is just depressing although earlier polls showed this so we shouldn’t be surprised:
I guess we should be happy that more don’t support using the military — for now.
Trump will have a honeymoon it appears. And if Project 2025 is any gyude, and it should be, they are planning to take full advantage of it.