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MAGA's War On Science Will Prove Deadly

The wrongly named "Christian Right" has been at war with science for many decades because scientific fact is all too often at odds with the so-called "deeply held" religious beliefs of this falsely pious set.  Hence the effort to have creationism taught in public schools and to stamp out the science based theory of evolution (a war that been going on for 100 years or more).  Hence the rejection of medically and science based knowledge of human sexuality and sexual orientation which threaten the right's manufactured myth that the bible only allows marriage between one man and one woman, even though polygamy was the actual norm in the Old Testament.  Anything that challenges this group's belief in myths and Bronze Age writings or their feelings is to be rejected.  Now, with white Christian nationalists now controlling the Republican Party and Project 2025 - a road map to take America backwards in time to an imagined golden age of white Christian privilege - science and fact based reality are under renewed assault and governmental organizations that once  championed science based medicine ,are being censored or seeing personnel intimidated at best and fired at worst.  As a former New York Times columnist lays out, the consequences will likely prove deadly and America's already falling life expectancy compared to other advanced nations will likely worsen.  Here are highlights:

In a better world Donald Trump’s musings about taking back the Panama Canal would lead him or people around him to study the canal’s history. They won’t, of course. But if they did they’d learn some important lessons.

One is that America gave up the canal, not out of a spirit of generosity or wokeness, but because U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone had become a strategic liability rather than an asset.

But there’s also a lot to be learned by asking how we managed to build the canal in the first place. Yes, it was a spectacular feat of engineering. But even more important, it was a triumph of medical science and science-based policy. To build the canal, America first had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. This meant understanding how these diseases were spread, then implementing widespread preventive measures that ranged from isolating infected patients with mosquito netting to eliminating sources of standing water in which mosquitoes could breed.

The success of these measures was an extraordinary achievement. But then, for much of the 20^th century America led the world both in medical research and in the application of that research to public policy. This one-two punch of knowledge and knowledge-based action led to an incredible decline in the rate of death from infectious disease

But that was the America that was.

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

I don’t know this for sure, but my prediction is that the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

And all of this is highly likely to lead to many preventable deaths — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

How did this happen? Gradually, then suddenly.

But back to science in general: Because it’s a method rather than a set of declarations from on high, you can’t consume it a la carte, rejecting scientific results you dislike for political, cultural or religious reasons. Reject evolution, and you undermine the basis for much of biology, and hence medical science. Reject the case for climate change, and you undermine the physics and chemistry that underlay that case.

And Republican politicians have been rejecting science they don’t like for a long time. Remember that Ronald Reagan called for schools to teach creationism alongside the theory of evolution. He also initially rejected the scientific consensus on the causes of acid rain, and prohibited the National Academy of Sciences from studying the issue. In the first case he was catering to the religious right, in the second to industry groups, but in both he was saying that he wouldn’t accept science he didn’t like, an attitude that is now almost universal on the right.

In addition to rejecting science he didn’t like, Reagan did all he could to undermine belief that government can be a force for good. This is a real problem for health policy, because most of the long-term decline in deaths from infectious disease has been the result of collective action, from ensuring access to clean water to promoting childhood vaccination at rates sufficient to prevent diseases from spreading.

Notably, the Reagan era is also when U.S. life expectancy began falling significantly below life expectancy in other advanced countries.

[T]here are presumably multiple reasons for high U.S. mortality, including high rates of death from both guns and motor vehicles. But refusal to believe in medical science, which should be seen as part of the rejection of science in general, was probably a factor even before Covid.

And then Covid came. Until vaccines were developed, all we could do involved precautionary measures, especially masking. And the thing about masking was that while masks can to some extent protect the wearer, what they mostly do is protect other people. Yet the modern Republican party is deeply hostile to the idea of making sacrifices, or even incurring some minor inconvenience, in order to help others.

Then came the vaccines, which were a medical miracle. But who was telling you that vaccines could save your life? Why, scientists and government officials — two groups that the modern right has been told never to trust.

The result was that many Americans refused to be vaccinated, and a large number — perhaps several hundred thousand — died unnecessarily.

Where does RFK Jr. fit into all of this? The political scientist John Sides, drawing on work by Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, argues that the deepest divide in America isn’t between left and right, it’s between “rationalists” who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and “intuitionists,” who rely on their feelings, on the other.

What comes next? As far as I know, there are no examples of modern nations turning their backs on medical science. But there’s every reason to expect the consequences to be ghastly. We can expect to see a resurgence of infectious diseases like measles and polio that had almost been eliminated. When — not if — the next pandemic strikes, we can expect the federal response to be even worse than it was when Trump confronted Covid.

The thing is, not all Republican senators are stupid. Some of them have to know that putting a crank like RFK Jr. in charge of public health will effectively condemn many of their fellow citizens to unnecessary death. Yet they’ll vote to confirm him anyway, out of sheer personal cowardice. And when they do, they’ll have blood on their hands.

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Americans Are Sleep Walking to Fascism

Watching the events unfolding under the Felon's second regime over the last two and one half weeks has left me a combination of dismayed, angry and frightened.  This is all the more so because a large segment of Americans seem indifferent to the events and the ultimate threat they play to their freedoms and longer term economic interest.  Even more frightening is the MAGA base that is cheering on the Felon and Musk's trampling of the law, unlawful access to personal information of millions of Americans.  All this latter groups cares about is "owning the libs" or inflicting harm on those the dislike and is unable to recognize the reality that they could be next in the bullseye once their usefulness to the Felon has ended.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at what happened to industrialist who allied themselves with Hitler and later came to regret their actions - this should be a stark lesson to those currently prostituting themselves to the Felon who has demonstrated time and time again that he has no loyalty to anyone. A piece in Salon looks at this national sleepwalking towards fascism and dictatorship.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump’s first weeks back in office have been a whirlwind of chaos and political destruction. This is by design and one of the central features of the “shock and awe” strategy that Trump and his allies have been planning for years, as detailed in Project 2025 and Agenda 47, to undermine American democracy and replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright authoritarianism. This strategy is being rapidly enacted through such actions as the almost 100 executive orders that include voiding the 14th Amendment, declaring a national emergency for Trump’s mass deportation plan, gutting the Department of Justice, seemingly as part of a plan to get revenge on his personal “enemies,” firing inspectors generals en masse, reversing 60 years of progress in civil and human rights and freezing federal loans and grants.

The Democrats, mainstream news media and the American public have been left flummoxed, confused and overwhelmed, as Rolling Stone details:

Late last year, as Donald Trump and his transition staff crafted executive orders, pardons, and a multi-front policy blitz designed to create “shock and awe” at the dawn of his second term in the White House, they were confident that the American people would ultimately let them get away with it — no matter the initial media or political backlash.

According to two advisers who spoke with the president-elect in advance of his inauguration, Trump was betting that a “flood the zone” approach could overwhelm a demoralized Democratic Party and oversaturate the media ecosystem. Trump and his officials were confident the general public would grow numb — and stay numb — to this opening onslaught.

So far, the judiciary has responded as an initial check. Its effectiveness in standing against Trump's assaults, however, remains very much in doubt.

Trump’s followers and allies are excited by the chaos because to them it is an example of him being a man of action and vitality and in all a great leader who is channeling the will and energy of the MAGA movement. The appearance of constant action, of being human dynamos, is a common tactic of authoritarians and fascist leaders.

Writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop summarizes the difficulty the mainstream news media is facing in responding to Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the Constitution, the rule of law, the country’s institutions and the American people’s collective sense of normalcy:

But journalistic attention...  is not in practice an infinite resource, and so the more of it that Trump seeks, the less of it there is to go around; in other words, if he benefits from ruling our attention, so he does from dividing it. Whether this is intended or not, it has the effect of slipping historically radical and abnormal policies and behaviors past us before we can get a firm grip on them — and Trump, as I’ve written before, certainly seems to have an instinctive, decidedly old-school grip on the finite nature of journalistic attention.

Donald Trump and his administration and its enforcers are only going to increase the rapidity and ferocity of their efforts to remake American society in service to their revolutionary project.

Ultimately, Donald Trump is having fun at the literal expense of the American people. For him, as for other autocrats and those in their orbit, the cruelty is the point.

In an attempt to make sense of Trump’s historically disruptive first weeks in office and what happens next, I reached out to a range of experts.

What is going on was to be expected but this does not mean that it is less striking or horrible. I don’t feel surprised about this Trumpist mix of lies, stupidity and extremism. As experts on fascism and populism know, these kinds of leaders typically use their first days in power to downplay legality, increase demonization and in the case of fascists, or wannabe fascists like Trump, even deportation and persecution. What we are witnessing is an attempt to set the tone to render acceptable what is usually in normal democracies regarded as unacceptable. They want to numb the population to idiotic statements, fascist types of lies and unpredictable and illogical actions.

Trump won with 49% of the vote. This, of course, cannot give the legitimacy to be unconstitutional and a wannabe dictator and yet he tries. This is something they know, and this is why they regard these first weeks as so important. American Greenland? Gulf of America or the taking of the Panama Canal? This is the kind of stuff we can expect from Trump: extreme nationalist propaganda and lies that possibly can become a reality if nobody else cares. Eventually, lies are confronted with reality and more citizens will be confronted with this. In other words, Trump was supported because of fake promises and propaganda when this is more evident, his legitimacy will decrease.

Belief is driving the Trumpist cult. Not evidence but belief. Belief is key to this extreme political religion. . . . . But many did not vote for Trump for this but actually for economic reasons. I think sooner or later many of them will realize how they believe in fake promises and lies. The question is how soon…

As I stated recently, the new big lie is that Trump won in a landslide and this authorizes him to turn the world upside down. This is the big confusion being promoted right now. In a democracy, winning elections does not give you a blank check to erase the past or legality. Trumpism launched a coup, and illegality cannot be erased by votes or pardons or the fake rewriting of history. When this happens, democracy is downplayed and dictatorship is on the horizon. This is what Trump promotes, the new big lies of his full legitimacy.

Part of the very big problem is that the guardrails are off and all the people in charge of them are being fired. You should not expect business as usual. Third, with all of the agencies being siloed or silenced, expect food issues to become more prevalent, you won't know the status of bird flu or any other pandemic. Trump has discussed dismantling FEMA right before the tornado and hurricane season and in the wake of the fires in Los Angeles.

Trump is incapable of compassion and that signals great danger for American lives in his second term. He remains at best a very paranoid, immature person now holding an office that demands thought and care. But for him, the priority is mostly about personal vendettas. He refuses — or is unable — to stop and think, which is the source of genuine strength of character. He appears to be motivated primarily by hurting people.

Americans were sleep-marched into fascism. Those who ignored the election are finding out about the dire reality and stakes of this situation. This is a life and death matter. Where I live in Southern California we just suffered through the worst fires in our history and the response from the Trump administration was to weaponize our tragedy against our Democratic leaders. They are coming for any politician with empathy, who takes their public servant oath seriously — anyone who gets in their way of unbridled greed. Welcome to West Russia, where the oligarchs run the politicians and all are bandits who steal from the poor to give to the rich.

The real problem is America has not been occupied by a foreign military so there’s no lived experience of what happens when oligarchs sink their fangs into a country. I documented 22 countries attacked by Russia in the exact same way America has been attacked — each of these countries has a main oligarch and multiple oligarchs beneath them whose job is to destroy democracy. America is not unique, just really naive.

We’re going to have to go through some things as a nation and a people. As I wrote in an elegy for my country, we got here because people don’t read history books anymore, which led to collective amnesia about reality. They like their politics and professional wrestling reality TV show, featuring supervillains behaving badly. They won't like it when their neighbors start disappearing.

It’s a mistake to think the majority of people are bad or wanted this, Trump won with less than 32% of all eligible voters. About a third of any population wants authoritarian leaders, they want their strongman to tell them what to do. The majority that doesn’t want billionaires to deliver them to austerity, or tell them what to do, better learn to get along and start working together. The regime will last as long as the people tolerate it.

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Trump Lost His Trade War

The Felon's efforts to start a trade war with Mexico and Canada are temporarily on hold with little actually being received from those countries while turmoil was generated among businesses and Wall Street.  With China, the increased tariffs are still in place - I am looking forward to the Felon's Walmart shopping base to be hit with higher prices - and China is retaliating.   Meanwhile, the rest of the world is getting the message loud and clear that with the Felon at the helm, America cannot be trusted and, if possible, have alternate trade relationships for self-protection. And none of this includes the Felon/Musk unilateral freeze of foreign aid which, including humanitarian aid, that not only will literally cost lives (especially in Africa), but opens the door for China and Russia to step into the gap to bolster their respective presences in the developing world. Indeed, overall, China is likely celebrating the Felon's shortsightedness. Sadly, the only things that matter to the Felon - we, the average citizens clearly do not - is stroking his ego and lashing out at perceived slights. A piece in The Atlantic by a true conservative and former Republican looks at the Felon's lost trade war. Here are excerpts:

Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:

American tariffs hurt Americans.

President Donald Trump has always insisted that tariffs are paid by foreigners, that they put free money into the U.S. Treasury. Trump’s week-long tariff war confirmed that nobody else in the U.S. government or in American business believes him. The National Association of Home Builders published a letter to the president predicting that his tariffs would raise the cost of housing construction. Automobile stocks slumped because investors expected Trump’s tariffs to add thousands of dollars to the cost of each new vehicle. . . . . belying Trump’s claim that the higher prices would be paid by the exporters.

Tariffs beget retaliatory tariffs.

When Trump paused tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those countries halted their retaliatory actions. But China is proceeding with a range of tariffs against U.S. exports, reserving more retaliation for later. Americans are already paying for previous rounds of Trump trade actions against China. In the first Trump presidency, China cut its purchases of U.S. soybeans by 75 percent over a single year in 2018. Brazil in 2018 overtook the United States as the world’s largest soybean producer.

There’s not much point in negotiating trade treaties with the United States.

Trump renegotiated NAFTA during his first term, replacing it with his USMCA deal. Now, in his second term, he has reneged on that. Trump’s version of NAFTA offered a range of legal ways to terminate the agreement; he did not use any of them. He did not even pretend that Canada or Mexico had somehow defaulted on their end of the bargain. He simply ignored the deal and proceeded with his tariffs under a series of contradictory excuses.

Mexico and Canada have oriented their economies to the U.S. under first NAFTA and then USMCA. That probably will not alter even after Trump’s episode of blackmail. But other countries, farther away, may wonder whether there’s any point in signing deals with such a bad-faith partner as the United States has become.

“Friend-shoring” is a fiction.

As relations have worsened between the United States and China, many in the U.S. government have looked to friend-shoring as a way to keep most of the benefits of free trade. The idea is to redirect U.S. purchasing power away from hostile China and toward more trustworthy partners. The assumption behind the term is that those partners will gladly trust the United States.

Trump, Vice President Vance, and their allies in Congress have threatened unilateral military action against Mexico; Trump himself indulges in speculation about the forced annexation of Greenland from NATO ally Denmark and about absorbing Canada as a 51st state.

Maybe that’s all just a lot of ugly talk. But the president has made clear that so-called friendship with the United States does not ensure anything for America’s partners . . . . Trump-shoring means that today’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy, without cause or even warning.

Instability is the future.

Trump has now allowed North American trade a 30-day reprieve. His supporters want to claim that he won big concessions worth all the tumult he caused. Such claims are transparently untrue. Canada had made its big proposals for more cooperation on border issues back in December. In any case, as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper has observed, illegal drugs are much more likely to flow north into Canada than south from Canada. Mexico’s offer to (once again) shift National Guard units to the border from other duties inside the country is generally recognized as symbolic. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page correctly identified the embarrassing truth in a headline on Monday: “Trump Blinks on North American Tariffs.”

Trump is a uniquely emotionally needy president, prone to impulsive vindictiveness. . . . . For two weeks after the election of 2020, he forbade his administration to cooperate with the transition process and denied Joe Biden’s team access to information and the funds required by law.

As Trump confronts derision about his splendid little trade war of February 2025, will he lash out again? And how is any business of any size supposed to plan for the future when the president creates economic crises to act out his ravenous ego needs?

“America First” makes it safer not to be America’s ally.

In 2024, the U.S. ran a trade deficit with Canada of about $55 billion. That same year, it ran a deficit with Vietnam of about $123 billion, more than twice as much, and with Thailand of about $46 billion, only slightly less. Yet it was Canada, not Vietnam or Thailand, that Trump threatened with tariffs.

A lesson of Trump’s trade war that all the world will hear: Countries such as Canada, Mexico, and Denmark that commit to the United States risk their security and dignity in the age of Trump. Countries such as Vietnam and Thailand that carefully navigate between the two great economic powers without making undue commitments maximize their security and their dignity.

To reward non-aligned countries and punish U.S.-aligned ones might seem a reckless, even a perverse, choice by a U.S. president. But that’s the president Americans have, and the choice he has made for them.

Expect instability and chaos to continue to the detriment of average Americans.

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Be Very Afraid: Project 2025 Is Here

Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, I and many others warned of the danger that Project 2025 posed to civil liberties and democracy.   We were greeted by comments that we were over reacting and/or insane assurances that the Felon had said he knew nothing about it, as if his lie erased all the evidence to the contrary.  Now, not even three weeks into the Felon's second regime and it is becoming very clear how the Felon's assurances should not have been believed.  I suspect things will only get worse as the Felon's far right and Christofascist minions push to wipe away civil rights for nonwhites and non-heterosexuals not to mention to ban abortion nationwide and perhaps even outlaw contraception.  Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are either onboard with the onslaught against those disliked by white Christian nationalists or are sitting on their hands out of fear of having a primary challenge or offending their orange overlord. One can only hope a backlash will build as the extreme agenda impacts more and more citizens who do not want a return to the society of the 1950's.  A piece n Vanity Fair looks at where America finds itself.  Here are highlights:

It turns out that the bogeyman of the last presidential election cycle, Project 2025, was no figment of our imagination, but an all-too-real plan for governing. We all remember Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the right-wing blueprint on the campaign trail and on the debate stage. “I have nothing to do with Project 2025—I haven’t read it,” he said during his one and only face-off with Kamala Harris. “ . . . . And yet CNN found that out of the 53 Trump executive actions and orders it analyzed, 36 “evoke proposals outlined” in Project 2025, on issues such as immigration, energy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Let’s recap how we got here. In the summer of 2024, Democrats seized upon Project 2025, a plan spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. . . . . The plan wasn’t a secret; the 922-page “Mandate for Leadership” had been published in April 2023 on Heritage’s site and boasted supporters across the right-wing spectrum.

Project 2025 looked very much like the agenda for a second Trump term, as I wrote at the time, even if then candidate Trump was keeping it at arm’s length. That’s understandable given how unpopular this right-wing road map was during the presidential race—even among Republicans. . . . . The Project 2025 wish list included rolling back LGBTQ+ protections, curbing abortion rights, and banning pornography, as well as greatly increasing presidential power.

The secret sauce in this very unsecret plan is money, like taking control of the federal budget and doling the money out, completely circumventing Congress’s power of the purse. In July of 2023, The New York Times reported how Trump was looking to “revive the practice of ‘impounding’ funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like—a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.”

Last week Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum calling on government agencies to “temporarily pause, to the extent permitted by law, grant, loan or federal financial assistance programs that are implicated by the President’s Executive Orders.” The move was unprecedented and, according to legal experts, unconstitutional . . .

Trump’s federal spending freeze—which was “previewed” in Project 2025, according to the Associated Press—went over like a lead balloon. A judge temporarily blocked part of the Trump plan, and the administration rescinded the OMB memo. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained on X that the move was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” adding that Trump’s executive orders “on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”

The whole mess smacked of Trump 1.0—hugely disruptive and confusing, while accomplishing little beyond rattling people in government (and reinvigorating Democrats). A second judge, on Friday, issued an order temporarily requiring the federal government to not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” funding promised to a number of states.

Meanwhile, Trumpworld continues to have the federal workforce in its sights. . . . . This all fits in with the Project 2025 goal of shrinking the nonpartisan federal workforce and replacing those employees with political supporters, the types of people who will bend the federal government to Trump’s will.

Trump may have gotten ahead of himself with such a radical funding freeze out of the gate, especially as his leadership isn’t yet in place. Vought, a Project 2025 architect and the author of the second chapter of the “Mandate for Leadership,” has yet to be confirmed by the Senate; same with Trump’s FBI director pick, Kash Patel, who has mused about making the agency’s headquarters “a museum of the deep state.” Sure, an OMB memo was pulled back, but that looks like a tactical retreat in a war on federal employees that’s only just begun.

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Trump's MAGA Takeover of Education May Backfire

The New York Post reports: President Trump may use his executive powers to gut the Department of Education and then push for legislation to abolish it as part of his administration’s efforts to shrink the size of government, according to a report. While this news may in particular thrill Christofascists within the MAGA base who loathe the Department due to its past efforts to fight discrimination, resist bringing religion into public schools, and stewardship of  Title 1 funds benefiting poor schools and students erased (it is, after all, always about themselves with these false Christians and to hell with everyone else), the Felon may discover that many parents - likely a sizable majority - do not want schools turned into MAGA indoctrination centers and still care about the quality of course offered to their children.  After some initial successes, the misnamed "Moms for Liberty" who sought to ban books and course materials that (i) mention the existence of LGBT people and (ii) seek to teach accurate American history that offend the zealots' sensibilities, suffered significant set backs and saw their extremist members voted off of school boards.  A piece in Salon looks at how the Felon, surrounded by far right ideologues, may be misreading what he may be about to unleash. Here are highlights:

Donald Trump tends to deflect attention from his witlessness by talking a lot, spewing a continual stream of hot air signifying nothing but narcissism and hate. It's a strategy now adopted by the people writing his stampede of executive orders, which read less like legal documents and more like Facebook rants written by a newly pardoned J6er on his 8th glass of Wild Turkey. But Trump has a tell: The more he talks, the less he has to say. And it seems this may also hold for his executive orders.

So it was with an executive order with the typical hyperventilating title "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling," which clocked in at a miserable 2,391 words, all devoted to solving a "problem" that exists only in the imaginations of right-wing activists. "In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight," the document breathlessly claims. It goes on to allege that "innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color" and even that "young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body." Yep, they are accusing your local schoolteacher of badgering your cis kid until they turn trans, which is not how any of this works.

With MAGA, every accusation is a confession, and no more is this true than in claims that it's the left who wants to "indoctrinate" children. That much is immediately proved in this document, which is reams and reams of orders to force children into silent submission to a far-right point of view. Teachers are threatened with arrest if they allow a trans student to dress how they like or use the name of their choice. Schools are commanded to replace fact-based history with "patriotic education principles," which is unsubtle code for fake histories that minimize slavery and valorize historical white supremacists.

There's plenty of intimidating language about not teaching "gender ideology," which is the scare term for accepting trans people exist. This is just more mandatory indoctrination, of course, because it means that if a kid asks about trans people, a teacher would be forced to lie and claim they are delusional, which cuts against the long-standing findings of the psychological community. 

As Dana Goldstein at the New York Times reports, "States and localities provide 90 percent of the funding for public education — and have the sole power to set curriculums, tests, teaching methods and school-choice policies." What federal funding exists "goes out to states in a formula set by Congress, and the president has little power to restrict its flow." State and local officials in blue states and cities are already telling Trump where to shove his executive order.

This "order" really should be understood more as a messaging document. In one way, that still makes it very dangerous. Fueled by far-right groups like Moms for Liberty, Republican-controlled states and localities have already been waging war on the local schools by banning books, trying to force queer students and teachers back in the closet, and bullying teachers into replacing real educational materials with right-wing propaganda. With this boost from Trump, they may get more emboldened, though it's hard to imagine it getting worse in places like Oklahoma, Florida, and Texas. 

But even in deep-red states, the efforts to remake public education in MAGA's image have been getting a lot of pushback. In Oklahoma, the Trumpified state superintendent keeps pulling stunts like trying to force students to pray for Donald Trump or mandating Bible study in the classroom. Often, these stunts fall flat, such as when the Oklahoma state attorney general blocked the mandatory prayer and local school districts simply refused orders to hold Bible study in class. In Texas, the state tried to bribe school districts into adopting the Bible curriculum by offering more money to school districts that use it. But with state civil rights and education groups threatening to sue, districts will likely see it's not worth the relatively small kickback, even if they were tempted. Georgia also tried to lure schools into offering Bible study classes. But there was almost no student interest, so most school districts didn't bother.

The likeliest response of most school districts will be to ignore Trump's "order." Any that are foolish enough to obey might find that they've got a much more formidable opponent than the bloviating fascist in the White House: local parents.

As I learned covering a school curriculum fight swing county in suburban Pennsylvania in 2023, parents will often put up an extraordinary fight to wrest control back from right-wing ideologues. It's not because they're "woke" and want to "indoctrinate" children with leftist ideals. Many of these parents were not especially political people, especially compared to their conservative opponents, who were rabidly ideological. Their concerns were kids having a real education and a safe environment to learn in. . . . . they were worried about what kids weren't learning if teachers were wasting time with fake lessons about a MAGA fantasy of the past. These parents had their eyes firmly on college applications and future employment opportunities, which they feared would be harmed if their kids didn't get a well-rounded education that taught them the truth about the world. They wanted a robust library so kids could enjoy reading, not one where books kids would actually read were pulled from shelves for being "woke." As one parent said of the Moms for Liberty school board members they were seeking to oust, "These are not serious people." It wasn't about culture war for these parents, but about making sure their kids weren't wasting their time at school. 

One reason I suspect a lot of school boards have simply ignored the Bible study and other unserious dictates from MAGA Republican leaders showboating for the cameras is that they know that many parents have their backs, often even in more conservative areas. This also is a reminder to demoralized liberals that resistance to Trumpism on the local level does matter and is surprisingly powerful. The fight over education can be a powerful way to demonstrate that Trump is a paper tiger, and if people stand up to him, he will often lose. He tries to distract from this reality with chest-thumping and talking — oh so much talking — but there is power in simply saying no to him and watching his ability to force his will falter.

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The Racist Undercurrents of Trump's Anti-DEI Agenda

Each day of the Felon's second regime seems to bring new worries and fears to many Americans, especially those who are nonwhite, foreign born or non-heterosexual. Despite untruthful denials, the Felon is steadily implementing Project 2025, a white Christian nationalist agenda (with emphasis on the "white") that in many ways seeks to return the nation back to the era before the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960's, a time when Jim Crow still held sway in the South and LGBT citizens largely remained invisible out of self-protection.  Many of the architects of  Project 2025 are the descendants of whites who opposed desegregation and from religious groups that seek to inflict their perverted form of supposed Christianity on all of society and to punish those who fail to conform.  For these people and their adherents anything that impedes their ability to discriminate and mistreat others is labeled as discrimination against them and anything that allows women and particularly blacks to succeed is an assault on the rights and privileges of white heterosexual males.  As the Felon's anti-DEI crusade continues, the racism that underlies the agenda is becoming increasingly clear.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this reality"

As Navy divers searched the Potomac River for bodies from the worst air crash in the United States in 20 years, President Trump zeroed in on what he saw as the cause: hiring programs that promote diversity.

The meaning behind his words was clear, that diversity equals incompetence. And for many historians, civil rights leaders, scholars and citizens, it was an unmistakable message of racism in plain sight at the highest levels of American government.

“His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive . . . . “But the message is the same, that women, ​Black and brown communities are inherently less capable, and if they hold positions of power or authority in government or business, it must be because the standards were lowered.​”

In the weeks since he took office, Mr. Trump has made a point of purging the federal government of D.E.I. initiatives in order to usher in what he called a “colorblind and merit-based” society.

In his actions, Mr. Trump has aligned himself with those who are brandishing the term D.E.I. as a catchall for discrimination against white people, and using it as a pejorative to attack nonwhite and female leaders as unqualified for their positions.

The issue plays into deep tensions among Americans about the role of race in society and helped supercharge Mr. Trump’s political comeback. Many voters, conservative and not, hoped to see a correction to what they saw as progressive politics gone too far.

D.E.I., in effect, became an all-purpose target for society’s ills.

“It’s the latest term that serves as a proxy for race, and it’s used as a politically expedient slur, as a way to stoke white grievances and to give a convenient scapegoat to whatever ails our nation,” said Timothy Welbeck, the director of Temple University’s Center for Anti-Racism.

A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said Democrats’ focus on D.E.I. undermined “decades of progress toward true equality.”

In Mr. Trump’s remarks last week on the plane crash, he cited no evidence that diversity programs had anything to do with the fatal accident. When asked how he could say that diversity hiring was to blame, he said, “I have common sense.”

In a misleading claim, Mr. Trump insinuated that the administration of President Barack Obama — the first Black president — had stocked the Federal Aviation Administration with people who could not do their jobs.

The concept behind the federal government’s diversity programs is not new; it developed as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The goal is to remove discriminatory barriers for women, minority groups and people with disabilities from jobs. The earliest benefactors were white women, white people in rural areas and disabled veterans, Mr. Welbeck said.

The idea was that qualified people were being overlooked.

Critics of D.E.I. say an emphasis on diversity means that hiring standards are compromised and that the focus on race and gender is a distraction from more urgent goals and the overall mission. . . . . But in the F.A.A. and elsewhere, officials say, the programs follow the same aptitude, medical and security standards for all hires.

“If it was all about merit, then we wouldn’t have Pete Hegseth,” said Mr. Abdul, referring to Mr. Trump’s defense secretary. Mr. Hegseth, a veteran and former Fox News host, took over the job of overseeing the Defense Department and its three million employees with little management experience beyond running veterans groups that he was accused of mismanaging.

For many, Mr. Trump’s attacks on D.E.I. point to his long history of inflaming racial tensions using dog whistles — from a campaign dating back to the 1980s against five Black men who were wrongfully convicted and ultimately exonerated of assaulting and raping a white woman, to his attempt to paint the first Black president as a noncitizen. But now, they say, the dog whistle is a bullhorn.

The uproar over D.E.I. is similar to the one over critical race theory a few years ago, in which conservative activists alleged that schools were indoctrinating students to become radical race warriors, and shaming students by teaching them about the history of slavery.

The architect of the movement to turn critical race theory into a Republican rallying cry, Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, laid out a blueprint for Mr. Trump in December to eliminate “left-wing radicalism” from the federal government.

In an emailed response to an inquiry from The New York Times last week, Mr. Rufo said that he had been in touch with members of the Trump policy team since the summer of 2020, when the fight against critical race theory began. He said Mr. Trump’s D.E.I. fight had been years in the making by several conservative groups whose staff members have now joined the administration. He called the administration’s execution of their plans “phenomenal.”

Civil rights groups say that it may be a new day, but that the themes have clear echoes, including the years after Reconstruction, which were marked by a violent backlash against Black people, and the tenure of President Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the federal work force.

Samuel Spital, the associate director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, said Mr. Trump’s dismantling of D.E.I. was an attempt to “remake our society.”

It is an effort, he said, to “collectively gaslight the American people” about the real victims of discrimination in the United States.

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The Price Americans Will Pay for Trump’s Tariffs

Many cultist and even some financial managers did not believe the Felon would impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada which are guaranteed to increase consumer prices in America and decreased American exports as those countries respond with their own retaliatory tariffs.  One has to wonder how long before those who bitched incessantly about gas, egg and grocery prices during the Biden administration (ignoring, of course the role played by the Covid-19 pandemic which was grossly mishandled by the Felon during his first regime).  Unfortunately, the Felon is oblivious to the true laws of economics and the damage tariffs do to consumers. Moreover, being totally self-absorbed, the Felon cares nothing about the lives and struggles of others. As for the Felon's yes man minions, they have the collective noses so far up the Felon's backside that it a wonder they don't suffocate. Expect no voices of reason or sanity from them.  A lengthy piece in The Atlantic by a conservative, former Republican looks at the damage Trump and his moronic supporters will wreak on the nation.  Here are column highlights:

To understand the harm Donald Trump has done with his tariffs on Canada and Mexico, here are four things you need to know:

First, every tax on imports is also a tax on exports.

The most popular beer in America is Modelo Especial, brewed in Mexico. Impose a 25 percent tariff on Modelo and sales will slide. So, too, will exports of the American barley that goes into Mexican beer. Mexico buys three-quarters of U.S. barley exports, almost all for brewing.

Trump surrogates may promise you that by driving Mexican beer off of grocery shelves, Trump’s tariffs will increase sales of U.S. barley to U.S. brewers. That promise may even be substantially true. But that offer has fine print that barley growers will notice.

Barley growers don’t care only about how much barley they sell. They care about the price at which they sell it.

A tariff raises the price of both every imported good and every good that competes with imports. If the price of Modelo is pushed up, the price of American-brewed beer will rise as well. American beermakers are not operating a charity. The tariff on Modelo allows them to both increase their market share at Modelo’s expense and raise their prices enough to increase their margins at the consumers’ expense.

But American consumers do not have infinite amounts of money. If they are paying more for beer, they have to make savings elsewhere. The result—and economists will prove this to you all day with facts and figures—is that prices in exporting sectors such as barley, and agriculture generally, will decline in proportion as prices in the importing sectors rise.

This is why developing countries that tried, after 1945, to bulldoze their way to industrialization using high tariffs—Argentina under Juan Perón; India under Jawaharlal Nehru—ended up instead isolating themselves from world markets. The tariffs did allow them to make their own radio sets and cars, but at the price of lowering national incomes and so shrinking the domestic market for those radios and cars. And, of course, the protected radios and cars could not compete on global markets against the superior products of the countries that accepted world prices, such as Germany and Japan.

Trump tariffs will be paid in the form of higher prices for imports and their substitutes, and lower profits and wages for everyone who works in export industries.

Second, every product is also an input.

When journalists write about tariffs, they look for everyday examples familiar to everyone, the way I just did with Modelo beer. Others will cite tomatoes or avocados, food items for which the cost of the tariff will be reflected in the price at the supermarket checkout. But the greatest harm done by tariffs is concealed in a way that prevents most of us from seeing the harm directly.

The largest glassmaker in North America is a Mexican company, Vitro. It operates plants in the U.S. and Canada, but the center of its operations is Monterrey, Mexico.

Very few of us buy big sheets of industrial glass. We do not see or care about the price. But we do care about the price of a new apartment. That apartment price depends on the cost of construction. Which depends on the price of the window systems that clad the apartment building. Which depends on the price of glass. Which Trump just raised by up to 25 percent.

You may buy a little aluminum in the form of cans and other household products. But the main way you pay for aluminum is in the price of airline tickets. Put a tariff on aluminum, and aircraft prices rise. Inflate aircraft prices, and airline-ticket prices also rise. . . . . Who will connect the surprise extra fee they have to pay to sit beside their child with a president’s decree against the cheaper Canadian aluminum that owes its price advantage to superabundant Quebec hydroelectric power?

Third, “illegal” is irrelevant; don’t expect relief from tariffs through lawsuits.

You might wonder how can Trump do this. After all, Trump himself renegotiated NAFTA and praised his new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal as “based on the principle of fairness and reciprocity.”

Trump’s actions are almost certainly illegal under treaty rules. But the U.S. stopped obeying treaty rules some time back.

In 2018, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The affected countries took their case to the World Trade Organization. More than four years later, in December 2022, the WTO issued its judgment. The United States lost on every point. Result? The Biden administration declared it would ignore the ruling.

On trade, the U.S. itself has led the way back to the law of the jungle. Remember that fact when the other big cats strike back.

Fourth, Americans may not remember their past actions, but others do.

You may have already forgotten all about last weekend’s Trump outburst against Colombia, backed by threats of high tariffs on Colombian products. You may not ever have known that Colombia opened up to U.S. wheat, soybean, beef, cotton, and peanut exports in order to secure a free-trade agreement with the United States. But Colombians remember.

Colombia’s politics are intensely polarized, the legacy of bitter years of insurgency and civil war. Through most of the 21st century, Colombia’s politics had been dominated by U.S.-friendly politicians of the right. In 2022, for the first time in its modern history, Colombia elected a president of the left, Gustavo Petro.

Trump is single-handedly reneging on 80 years of American work to persuade others to trust and rely on the United States. He is remodeling the international image of the U.S. after himself: impulsive, self-seeking, short-sighted, and untrustworthy.

Mexico and Canada must ultimately suffer whatever the U.S. imposes on them. They cannot relocate; they have few credible options. Mexico has learned from especially bitter experience that any attempt to strike its own international deals will be vetoed by the U.S., using force if necessary.

Over the past five centuries, the Euro-Atlantic world has seen the rise of one great power after another: Habsburg Spain, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, Victorian Britain, Imperial and then Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. Each of those powers was ultimately brought down because it frightened other powers into uniting against it.

The United States since 1945 tried a different way. It reconciled the world to its dominance in great part by using that dominance for the benefit of willing partners. The United States provided security, it opened markets, it welcomed the improving prosperity of fellow democracies and like-minded allies.

In the 21st century, the United States faces a new kind of adversary. Past rivals might have matched the U.S. in wealth, technology, or military strength, but not in all three. China today is the nearest peer power the U.S. has faced since Americans battled the British Empire in the War of 1812. To balance China while keeping the peace, the U.S. will need more and better friends than ever before. Trump is doing his utmost instead to alienate and offend those friends.

“America First” means “America Alone.” This week’s trade wars are steps on the way to future difficulties—and, unless a great infusion of better judgment or better luck suddenly occurs, future disasters.

The geopolitical verdict on the first Trump presidency could be written with a breath of relief: “Bad as it was, it could have been worse.” On the present trajectory, the verdict on the second may not come with any relief at all.