Sunday, July 05, 2026
The Rising Price of the Felon's Anti-Science Agenda
There’s a well-known scene from a 2001 episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants” in which a mob of fish mistakes a feeble old man for a bully and attacks him. The gag happens again, leading a blue fish to famously quip, “How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?” As far as metaphors go, it’s a pretty apt one for how pathogens, parasites and other infectious organisms serve as lessons for [the Felon]
President Donald Trumpon basic principles of public health. The problem is he’s seemingly incapable of learning — and Americans are paying the price.The reason I’m referencing a children’s cartoon is that this is the level of intellectual discourse that science has been reduced to under the MAGA and MAHA movements spurred by Trump and lackeys like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most of this anti-science policy amounts to plugging their ears and going “nah nah nah” whenever something about climate change, vaccines or racial injustice is mentioned.
The rest is standard schoolyard bullying, which, as a new tracker from the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrates, has resulted in 574 attacks on science and 187 potential scientific integrity violations since Trump began his second term. These attacks include censorship, appointing cronies to key agency positions, gutting regulations and funding and targeting scientists based on identity. Consequently, the last year and a half has been a disaster in almost all realms of scientific progress and public health in the U.S.
The examples of this administration flouting science and reaping the painful consequences are nearly endless and date back to Trump’s first term, when he flouted virus surveillance programs, essentially inviting COVID-19 in, then did little to stop it and let it flourish into a pandemic that has killed at least 1.1 million Americans and counting. But for more recent cases, we need only look at the last few weeks and boy, have the consequences of an anti-science agenda piled on recently.
To take an easy example, there’s the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool scandal, in which “renovations” ordered by Trump resulted in a nauseating algae bloom, because whoever the president hired to paint the pool bottom didn’t seem to grasp how this would trap heat and provide the perfect conditions for algae to thrive. This science experiment is far less consequential than the record-breaking Ebola crisis that has been worsened by cuts to foreign aid, for example, but it’s no less anti-science. Rather than admit he doesn’t understand basic pool science, Trump’s response has been to arrest at least six people and float accusations against rogue vandals, a “painfully stupid” conspiracy theory, . . .
This is far from the only rake the Trump admin has stepped on in recent days. There’s also the Pentagon announcement last week that it is reversing course on flu vaccines, making them mandatory yet again. This comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the shots optional in late April. It only took about two months for a serious outbreak to occur: this month, nearly 300 people have been sickened at Lackland Air Force Base in Bexar County, Texas, which has so far hospitalized four people and may have resulted in one death (the case is still being investigated).
But Hegseth seems to think you can deflect viruses with creatine powder and tanning lotion. Vaccines are “woke” — until you have hundreds of people sickened for no reason when there is a safe and effective vaccine that millions of people take each year. If more people got vaccinated, flu season wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is every year in America. We collectively and effectively choose to get sick, slowing down the economy and killing vulnerable people, because some of us don’t like getting shots. I’ve argued before that the lack of flu vaccine uptake is one of many aspects of the American death cult, but for this shot in particular, mandates are unlikely to work on the broader public.
On the topic of vaccines that probably should be mandatory, measles continues to wreak havoc across the U.S., with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 2,134 confirmed cases this year. In 2025, there were just shy of 2,300 cases, which means 2026 is almost certainly going to outpace that record. Approximately 93% of these measles patients are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccine status. The disease, which was once eliminated from the U.S., is now so embedded in our society that we have essentially lost that measles elimination status, whether anti-vaccine health officials like Kennedy acknowledge it or not, as Dr. Jess Steier argued in a recent op-ed for CIDRAP.
Meanwhile, Kennedy is working overtime to further restrict access to vaccines by rewriting the charter of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a federal committee that provides guidance on vaccines. If the ACIP votes to remove vaccines from a free vaccination program — unfortunately, a real possibility — more than half of US kids would lose access to that immunization, experts warn. Once again, it’s the American people who pay the price of the Trump admin’s anti-science agenda.
Yet another example of Trump’s anti-science policies coming back to bite him — this time, somewhat literally — is the return of New World Screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that bore into the open flesh wounds of its victims. For decades, the U.S. has maintained a program in which these flies are bred in a lab, bathed in sterilizing radiation and released around Panama, which prevents the insect from creeping northward.
[C]uts to these programs and Trump’s antagonism toward Mexico, Panama and other Latin American countries threatened to bring the parasite back to the United States. Now it’s happening, with the latest update from the Department of Agriculture reporting 27 cases in the last 30 days. It may not sound like much, but it will be a multi-billion-dollar effort to contain. The response from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been, predictably, to blame immigration and former President Joe Biden.
When cases of screwworm began popping up in Mexico in 2024, Biden’s USDA shuttered southern ports of entry to live cattle imports to prevent the spread. Trump reopened those ports in Feb. 2025 to appease the cattle industry, while staffing cuts at the USDA and sluggish funding reviews have arguably contributed to screwworm’s return.
Screwworm is mostly a concern for cattle ranchers — and given the outsized climate impacts of factory farms, it would be a good thing if people eat less meat — but it still stands as yet another embarrassing neglect of science and public health that is egg on Trump’s face. It’s certainly bad news for the ranchers and farmers that President Screwworm has consistently screwed over.
How many times must he learn his lesson? Trump’s hostility to science isn’t just ignorant; it’s destructive. But it seems like no matter how many times a totally predictable result blows up in his face, he won’t stop the rancor toward science. He won’t stop attacking scientific leaders, cutting their funding or hampering their ability to do their job. He allows his flunkies to attack proven technologies like vaccines or deny the catastrophic decay of our environment due to burning fossil fuels, and on and on.
Trump is only tightening his grip on science, recently proposing rule changes to how federal research is funded under the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently overseen by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. The rule changes would not only weaken the peer review process and forbid international scientific collaboration, but they would also ban research on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion. The blowback is impossible to predict, but if the last 18 months have indicated anything, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
These are far from the only enterprises that seek to rebuild what the Trump admin has demolished, and they all need our support. Unfortunately, it won’t be nearly enough to undo the damage — some of which could take decades to repair, with a staggering death toll in its wake — unless we finally rein in this out-of-control, anti-science crusade once and for all.
Saturday, July 04, 2026
Trump’s 250th Is a Festival of Slop History
As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.
Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. . . . . he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.
Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.
Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”
The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, . . . . Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.
[O]ther action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.
Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.
Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.
The Paradox of Surging Gay Literature/Films
In early June, Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican firebrand from Tennessee, did something he often does: Post a message on X that was sure to shock. “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.”
But unlike some of his other recent virulent posts — for example, about Muslim Americans — this one drew condemnation from many members of his own party, including Mike Johnson, the House speaker.
The post’s brief life spoke to the divisions within the Republican Party on same-sex marriage. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision protecting gay marriage, turns 11 this year, and there is little indication that establishment Republicans are questioning it. At the same time, Christian conservatives, like Mr. Ogles, now a crucial part of Mr. Trump’s coalition, are pursuing that goal with renewed energy and ambition, often using the push for trans rights as a new front in the debate.
Support for gay marriage is now declining, reversing a yearslong trend. Earlier this month, Gallup released a poll showing that Republican support for gay marriage now stood at 37 percent, a decline of 18 percentage points from a high in 2022. Support among independents declined, too.
And a few Republican lawmakers are also pushing resolutions against gay marriage. . . . . Republican states have even started to rebrand Pride Month, the June commemoration of the Stonewall uprising and the signature moment for the gay liberation movement, calling it Fidelity Month or Nuclear Family Month.
Despite the arguments being made by Christian conservatives, and the findings of the Gallup polling, Gavin Smith, a gay Republican town councilman in Lexington, S.C., said he has not seen any evidence of rising opposition to gay couples among voters.
Like Mr. Smith, the husband and I have not experienced any hostility among yacht club and country club members we interact with and from Republican clients. Yet, the growing attacks from evangelicals and their political prostitutes within the GOP remain unnerving and can undermine one's sense of safety and security. Meanwhile and in direct contradiction to the movement within the GOP, as noted at the outset of this post, gay themed literature and films are seemingly surging and being embraced. One of David Beckham's sons is making his acting debut in a gay romance film and Amazon will be releasing a sequel to "Red White and Royal Blue" - one of Amazon's top streaming films - as filming prepares to start for season two of "Heated Rivalry" which seemingly has a cult following among straight women. A second piece in the New York Times looks at this surge in acceptance:
Just over 10 years ago, I opened a small bookstore a few hours northwest of New York City. The shelves are arranged by affinity: Notable people choose their 10 favorite books; elsewhere, titles gather around more whimsical themes. Early this year, I found myself creating a shelf I could not have imagined when I started: queer sports romances.
That’s where you now find “Heated Rivalry” beside “Thirty Love” and “Futbolista” — closeted hockey players, closeted tennis players, closeted college soccer players. The covers promise muscle, yearning and secrecy. Though the protagonists tend to be men, many of the genre’s writers and readers are women. At first, I saw these books as a playful little subgenre, a narrow tributary of romance publishing. Lately, I’ve come to see them as evidence of a much larger shift: Queer literature has become one of the growth engines of the publishing industry.
L.G.B.T.Q. fiction has never been more visible, more varied or better promoted. . . . It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published “Dancer From the Dance,” Larry Kramer published “Faggots” and Edmund White published “Nocturnes for the King of Naples.” That post-Stonewall flowering was followed by AIDS, which robbed queer literature of many of its writers and a substantial portion of its audience. Publishers retreated. To be labeled a gay or queer writer was a constraint.
The old assumption was that queerness should be downplayed to get a wider readership. In 2007, when Rakesh Satyal’s “Blue Boy,” a gay Indian American coming-of-age novel, was being shopped around, he thought its intersection of South Asian and queer experience might broaden its appeal. Publishers saw the opposite. “It was seen as a reduction of the audience,” he told me.
Today, the opposite looks true. Queerness sells. . . . . This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters.
According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published “A Little Life,” heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction had reached more than $80 million, a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled.
The very qualities that once made queer fiction seem too risky now make it useful. Queer books also come with organic systems of circulation: book clubs, queer bookstores, online fan communities and events that double as gatherings of friends. . . . For publishers, that is increasingly valuable. Queer books don’t simply find individual readers; they find communities.
The boom has created incentives for publishers to package gayness and for straight writers to borrow it. AndrĂ© Aciman, who is not gay, wrote one of the defining gay love stories of the past 20 years in “Call Me by Your Name.”
“I am writing outside my own experience to an extent,” he said, “but I’ve experienced desire, and I understand desire, and I can understand the desire between these two people on a human level. I hope that it felt true because it felt true when I was writing it, and I think that’s the important thing.”
One can only hope that the explosion of gay literature and movies/series will help usher in a renewed acceptance of LGBT people and demonstrate that our lives and loves are legitimate and have true value.
Friday, July 03, 2026
Like the Felon, Putin Is Slipping Into Delusion
When things get dicey in Moscow, Vladimir Putin tends to drop out of sight for a while, retreating to one of his residences and canceling public events. Only his closest aides know how he spends his time during these absences, which can go on for days even in the middle of a national crisis. The Kremlin does its best to fill the vacant airtime on state TV with pretaped footage of the president, waiting for him to reemerge and declare that everything remains under his control.
Since the end of last year, when Ukraine intensified its campaign of drone and missile strikes on Russian cities, Putin has taken a few of these breaks. Two of them lasted for more than a week. He has mostly avoided talking about the Ukrainian strikes, even as they caused fuel shortages across Russia, destroyed infrastructure, and shattered the sense of stability that Putin offers his people in exchange for their loyalty. His first detailed response to the threat came on Monday, and he did his best to seem unmoved.
In a carefully scripted interview on state TV, Putin looked bored with the details of governing Russia and managing the frustrations of his citizens, but he did not appear tired of his war in Ukraine. He spent most of the 19-minute conversation with a Russian news anchor dissecting the minutiae of the fighting . . . . The performance seemed designed to suggest that, away from the cameras, the Russian leader spends his time hunched over maps of the battlefield.
The Russian people, by contrast, have run out of patience with the war their leader seems so eager to continue. A survey released on the same day as Putin’s interview found that 81 percent of Russians want the war to end “as early as tomorrow.” The number of respondents who want the fighting to continue until Russia’s victory, no matter how long it takes, dropped in the survey to 9 percent, the lowest level ever recorded by the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia
Its most recent survey matched up with the images and complaints that have flooded Russian social networks in the past few weeks, showing long lines at gas stations in Moscow and trucks stalled without fuel on the roadside. “There’s no gasoline in the city,” one man posted from a suburb of Moscow. “And the TV is silent about it.”
If Putin cares about such problems, he has done a decent job of hiding it. “Everything is working stably and with a big reserve of strength,” he said in Monday’s interview, referring to the fuel shortages spreading through Russia.
M]ore than four years into his invasion of Ukraine, this element of Putin’s character seems only to have hardened. He treats the war as his calling, the purest expression of the power he has hoarded for a quarter century. The incalculable pain and suffering it has caused, with more than a million casualties overall, do not evoke for Putin anywhere near the level of emotion he displays when talking about the war’s mechanics. . . . . The Russian president’s obsession with the details of the fighting appears to have crossed the line into delusion.
Does that mania for war make him any more likely to cut his losses and accept a negotiated peace? Probably not. His interview on Monday illustrated what many in Ukraine and Europe have long concluded about Putin’s state of mind. He has convinced himself that the attritional math of the war favors Russia, and he will continue to press the numerical advantage of his forces regardless of how long the lines for gasoline in Moscow might get.
In the end, Russia could still face defeat, and the recent dynamics of the fighting have made that outcome look more likely than ever. Russia now loses an average of at least 30,000 troops a month, killed or gravely wounded. The Russian military struggles to replace those losses despite offering bonuses to new recruits worth up to $80,000—enough to buy an apartment in many Russian cities. For those sent to the front, the average life expectancy stands at around two or three weeks, according to one Russian military blogger who follows the fighting closely.
Mobilizing more troops would be among Putin’s more obvious options for continuing the war for a long time to come. In September 2022, during another low point for him in this war, Putin called up 300,000 soldiers in the first military draft in Russia since the Second World War. Doing that again would devastate the Russian economy and risk a surge of popular unrest. But many close observers of the war in Russia have concluded that Putin has no other choice. “This fall, there will either be peace or mobilization,” another military blogger wrote a few weeks ago, setting off a debate on Russian social networks about whether men should pack their bags for basic training.
In his interview, Putin did not mention any plans to mobilize more forces. He also didn’t point to any viable path to peace. He only repeated his aim to conquer all of Novorossiya, or New Russia, a vague term that, in his mind, seems to encompass most of southern and eastern Ukraine. At their current rate of advance, Russian forces would need several more years of fighting to stand a realistic chance of achieving that goal. They would also need to be prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But that appears to be Putin’s intent, regardless of how his people might feel about it.
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