Big lies move like viruses in the culture

Kos of Daily Kos discussed why the nasty guy, the vice nasty, Musk, and many of their associates are calling for white women to produce more babies. Musk is even using the term “population collapse.” To keep the population steady, the fertility rate needs to be about 2.1 children per woman. But the fertility rate for every ethnic group in America except Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (2.24) ranges from 1.97 for Hispanic to white at 1.57 to Asian at 1.35. There are reasons why a declining population is a problem: A shrinking workforce leads to economic stagnation and a smaller tax base cuts into the needs of an aging population such as Social Security and Medicare. Innovation is done mainly by the young before they get stuck in “It’s always been done this way.” Smaller population lowers rural property values now and will soon affect cities. The population decline could be fixed by immigration – the solution that conservatives hate the most because most immigrants aren’t white. Immigration is also best for the world population that is way too high. Fertility rates are low because of Republican policies that care about babies only before they are born. The policies they oppose include: Day care support. Health care support, including Medicaid. Abortion care. Paid maternity leave. Promoting vaccines. School lunches. Help to pay for college. Livable wages. Kos says liberals oppose a piece too, that being affordable housing, to which liberals say Not In My Back Yard. All of those are reasons why fertile adults choose to have one or no children. Instead of addressing those issues the nasty guy and friends are proposing: Scholarship support for the parents. $5,000 cash “baby bonus” paid to mothers after delivery. Programs to teach women the best time to conceive. A “National Medal of Motherhood” to women with six or more children. They’re not serious about addressing the problem. Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans love torture. Yes, Willis establishes the premise. Two planeloads of deportees, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, were sent to the CECOT prison in El Salvador known for its violence. And Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went there in late March to be photographed in front of prisoners to show what a badass she pretends to be. In 2017 the nasty guy joked to police officers in New York they should abuse people they arrest. Bush II is known for the “enhanced interrogation” in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Willis asks, if torture has been proven to be ineffective in fighting crime and terrorism, why do conservatives still embrace the barbaric techniques? Willis answers:

Conservatism is weak. Problems like immigration, terrorism, and crime are complex. There is no magical button to make the fallout from these issues disappear. These are systemic issues that have to be addressed from multiple angles, which sometimes involves diplomacy, science, study, and reason. Conservatism would rather tell the public that the bad people will go away as long as they act “tough” instead of addressing root causes, which sometimes can indicate that the United States’ actions created the problem or made the problem worse. The right would rather just back torture and abuse—particularly if the subjects in question have brown skin.

Conservatives love to use strong solutions to show liberal weakness, even though the liberal approach has made progress on many big issues

It’s weak to resort to abuse and torture and posing in front of incarcerated people to get clout with the in-crowd. What is stronger is standing up against abuse and championing human rights.

I feel Willis doesn’t get to the real issue. Republicans claim a higher level in the social hierarchy. People who are obsessed with their position in the hierarchy oppress the levels below them. And torture is very useful in that. Getting to a browser tab that’s been there a while. In a pundit roundup for Kos posted on April 1, Chitown Kev quoted Ian Bogost of The Atlantic discussing the ways the nasty guy has cut billions in federal grants to universities. That has prompted universities to cut staff or freeze hiring and cut back on graduate admissions. Deportations have made international students and faculty scared, lowering foreign admissions which tend to pay full price.

Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination. Few administrators have talked about this risk in public, but they take a different tone in private as they try to figure out how broken budgets can be fixed. I’ve spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.

Historian David Blight wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the executive order demanding the Smithsonian Institution make some changes. I heard about these demands when they were issued and mentioned them in passing. Now I have a way to share a bit more.

The order’s repeated invocation of the Smithsonian Institution echoes now-familiar right-wing goals outlined in Project 2025 and elsewhere: ending the alleged “woke” agendas on race and gender, creating “parents’ rights” and school choices and promoting history aligned with founders’ “values.” According to the president, “objective facts” have been replaced with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology.” And then comes that penetrating epithet, the order’s organizing logic: the desire to end the “revisionist movement” carried out by unnamed historians. [...] The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites. [...] Big lies move like viruses in the culture, and though we do have evidence, facts and ethics on our side, there are no vaccines. The crude intent of this order is to further break institutions and to silence historians.

That paragraph about “objective facts” being replaced by “distorted narrative driven by ideology” sounds very much like projection – accusing opponents of doing what they are doing. This is a day for pundit roundups. This second one is from last Saturday and is by Greg Dworkin. He quoted EJ Dionne of The New Republic:

The most conspicuous moment of truth has been for Trump’s supporters in big business and other advocates of a loosely regulated free market. They thought they could get what they wanted out of Trump, mainly lower taxes and less regulation, without having to worry about his very explicit campaign promises to impose tariffs, let alone to do so in a madcap way that now threatens their own wealth. They couldn’t imagine that Trump would happily wreak such havoc in the national and global economies or demolish the entire post–World War II economic system. Why did they miss this? The fact that Trump lies regularly and has few fixed principles has, perversely perhaps, been a source of his political strength. Those who rally to him fool themselves into thinking they can have Trump à la carte. They assume he really means his pledges to policies they like and that he’s lying to the masses when he promises policies they don’t like. All the old nonsense about taking Trump “seriously but not literally” was a way for his apologists to assume he couldn’t really mean the more outlandish things he said. His supporters in business and among the wealthy like to view themselves as gimlet-eyed realists, so the ease with which they were bamboozled is quite remarkable—and is easily measured.

A Ukraine peace deal, though stalled, is still in the news. So this tweet by Ruth Deyermond from last Friday is still appropriate:

Trump admin threats to abandon "peace deal" negotiations would be more worrying if they'd ever shown the slightest interest in actually helping to achieve peace in Ukraine, instead of trying to compel a ceasefire on Russia's terms while grabbing Ukrainian assets.

Paul Offit of Beyond the Noise:

RFK Jr. believes many weird things about the causes, treatment, and prevention of infectious diseases. These false beliefs might seem disparate and unrelated, but they’re not. They’re all rooted in a single belief described on pages 285-288 of his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. In short, RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in the germ theory. He believes in something called the miasma theory. The miasma theory is a long-abandoned medical theory that holds that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors (i.e., miasmata) that are generated by rotting organic matter, such as trash sitting out on the street. According to the miasmists, diseases aren’t passed from one person to another; rather, they are the product of poor hygiene and sanitation.

I first heard about the miasma theory way back in November of 2009 when I read and discussed the book The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. It is about how physician John Snow and cleric Henry Whitehead figured out the cause of the 1854 London cholera outbreak. At the time the miasma theory was used to explain disease outbreak. The sleuthing of Snow and Whitehead to trace the source of the outbreak to a water pump contaminated by bacteria was quite remarkable for the day. That prompted London to create an adequate sewer system, though that took about a decade. Dworkin also quoted a tweet by Craig Fuller:

Many truckers I've spoken with don't realize how quickly container volumes have collapsed. Starting in May, port freight out of California will be almost eliminated. Its going to be a bloodbath in dray, followed by intermodal, and then a collapse in I-20 & I-40 trucking.

The pundit roundup for Sunday was assembled by Kev, who quoted Rosemary (Marah) Al-Kire, Clara L. Wilkins, and Michael Pasek writing for The Conversation.

Our 2024 research, as well as other scholars’ work, suggests that people’s beliefs about anti-Christian discrimination are tied with their attitudes about race. These studies suggest that when politicians talk about anti-Christian bias, it does more than signal a concern and commitment to Christians – it can also serve as a signal of white solidarity. Even though they remain the largest religious and racial groups, white Americans and Christian Americans have both declined as a proportion of the U.S. population. Over the past two decades, the percentage of Christian Americans has decreased from 78% to 63%, and the percentage of white Americans has decreased from 69% to 60%. White Christians now account for less than 50% of the country. Many scholars have argued that, at the root, some white and Christian Americans feel threatened by these demographic shifts. Increasing secularization and other cultural changes have added to some white Christians’ sense that their identity is under attack. According to FBI data, however, only 3% of hate crimes over the past five years targeted Christians. In comparison, 14% targeted Jews, Muslims or Sikhs – groups that make up just 3% of the population. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 55% of white Americans believe discrimination against white people is as much of a problem as discrimination against minority groups. Meanwhile, 60% of white evangelicals say that Christians in the U.S. face discrimination.

Timothy Snyder writing for his “Thinking About...” Substack on the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In just three months, the Trump people have made the unthinkable much more likely. They have created the conditions for terrorism, and thus for terror management. This is true at several levels. Most obviously, they have debilitated the services that detect terrorist threats and prevent attacks: [the CIA, FBI, DHS, and NSA]. The Musk-Trump people run national security, intelligence, and law enforcement like a television show. The entire operation of forcible rendition of migrants to a Salvadoran concentration camp was based upon lies. It is not just that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly apprehended. The entire thing was made for television. Its point was the creation of the fascist videos. But this is a media strategy, meant to frighten Americans. And a media strategy does not stop actual terrorists. It summons them. Terrorism is a real risk in the real world. The constant use of the word to denote unreal threats creates unreality. And unreality inside ket (sic) institutions degrades capability. Security agencies that have been trained to follow political instructions about imaginary threats do not investigate actual threats. Fiction is dangerous. Treating the administration’s abduction of a legal permanent resident as a heroic defense against terror is not only mendacious and unconstitutional but also dangerous.

In the comments of Wednesday’s roundup are several more cartoons commemorating the death of Pope Francis. One by Steve Greenberg and posted by paulpro shows a smiling Francis and the words, “Pope Francis was really a DEI hire. Devotion, Empathy, Inclusion.” Also posted by paulpro is a cartoon by Antonio Rodriguez Garcia showing Francis on his way to heaven. In one hand is a soccer ball and the other hand is pulling a carryon bag with the Palestinian and LGBTQ rainbow flags. Way down in the comments Sotto Voce posted a cartoon by B. Smaller that had been printed in the New Yorker. It shows a woman talking to a young man. “Just remember, Mr. Big Fancy Libertarian, no one is a self-made man to their mother.” I’ve been a fan of the amazing videos put out by the band OK GO, though I’m not much of a fan of their music. I discussed their videos five times between 2010 and 2016 (sorry, I didn’t spend time finding the links). Just recently I heard an interview of a new video. And I may have missed one or two in the meantime. The video “Love” has a lot of fun with mirrors, both with robots holding mirrors and bigger mirrors used as big kaleidoscopes. At the end the singer puts on a mirrored suit. As usual, the video is amazing. I watched the video about making the Love music video. They used robots because they wanted the mirrors to be moved and held in precise ways that a human wouldn’t be able to do. And each of those robots had to be precisely programmed. Then they had to fit it all together to shoot in one take, though they needed 39 tries. Tomorrow I’m off to a handbell event, returning home late Saturday. So with a movie on Sunday and bell stuff on Monday and Tuesday I probably won’t post again until Wednesday.