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Trump/MAGA Threaten America’s Formula for Greatness

Polling and surveys have shown that the less educated one is, the more likely you were a Trump voter in 2024.  Years ago, the Republican Party was a champion of quality education and respectfully of knowledge and expertise.  That era is long gone and highly educated voters skew heavily towards being Democrats while today's GOP and the MAGA base celebrate ignorance and seek to censor education so that it conforms to 12th century religious beliefs and/or far right ideology. Under the Felon's regime - and under executive orders of outgoing Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin - America's history is being sanitized so as to not injure delicate white  sensibilities and the accomplishments and contributions of non-whites, women, and gays are being erased. As a column in the New York Times lays out, this assault on education and elite universities and the slashing of research funding, combined with the Felon's tariffs and the jihad against immigrants and immigration are harming America's future and ignoring the true story of how America became a super power. The architects of Project 2025 which the Felon is steadily implementing want an America controlled by white right wing "Christians" - everyone else is to be subordinate - where anything that does not conform to their warped and ignorance based religious dogma is erased or silenced regardless of the long term damage to the nation.  Here are column highlights:

What’s the secret formula that has made the United States the dominant superpower in the world today?

I’d point to three fundamental ingredients, each of which is now being weakened. When I think of the historical legacies of our generation and of President Trump, I wonder if they will be less about the political battles in the headlines and more about the slow shriveling of America’s global standing.

Patriotism is less about waving flags and more about defending these three forces that over two centuries have made America pre-eminent:

A commitment to education at every level, resulting in global leadership in science and technology.

I believe the answer to almost every question is education — the highest-return long-term investments are often in human capital. Yet throughout the ages there have always been those eager to execute Socrates, to subject Galileo to the Inquisition, to ban books.

America became the world’s leading nation largely because of its emphasis beginning in the 19th century on mass education when other countries educated only a sliver of elites, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz argued in their landmark 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology.”

The United States helped pioneer public elementary schools and widespread high school and college attendance; later, American research universities became global leaders and nurtured technology hubs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Thus the United States boasts the Magnificent Seven technology companies, while there isn’t anything comparable in Europe. America’s scientific and technological excellence arises in part because of a symbiotic partnership between universities, the federal agencies that fund research and the private companies that commercialize that knowledge.

America’s educational supremacy arguably began slipping decades ago, as some East Asian countries eclipsed us in high school graduation rates and in science and math skills among young people. But Trump is adding to the pressure by gutting the Department of Education, including research and data collection that show how we can improve outcomes. Even worse, he is waging war on America’s most eminent universities.

American excellence in science drives economic competitiveness and well-being. Yet Trump is winding down mRNA vaccine programs that are full of promise in tackling cancer and has slashed investments in medical research.

Any president should be proud of universities like Harvard and Columbia, not attempt to crush them. We stand up to China with not only aircraft carriers but, even more, by educating our own young people and leading in research in artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and materials science.

[W]e should be doing what we did after Sputnik in 1957, recommitting this country to science and education. Instead, the Trump administration’s hostility to great universities seems to reflect a larger scorn for science in fields from vaccines to climate change. It is the latest flowering of an anti-intellectualism that goes back to China’s first Qin emperor burying scholars alive and, in this country, to the Scopes trial, the Joseph McCarthy hysteria and the 2017 tax on university endowments.

An inclination toward free markets and free trade, supported by the rule of law.

This is the pillar that Trump is most respectful of. He mostly believes in capitalism and free markets — probably more than many Democrats — but has led a rapid retreat from free trade. His tariffs are the highest since the 1930s. Trump has also systematically chipped away at some of the underpinnings of a market economy. Markets thrive with prudent fiscal and monetary management, yet his tax cuts lead to soaring debt even as he tries to crush the independence of the Federal Reserve. Corruption is a bane of capitalism, yet his family has seemed to use the presidency as an A.T.M.

And the rule of law? England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution partly because of a legal system that offered protection and predictability. In contrast, Trump has periodically defied lower courts and used the Department of Justice to punish his political opponents. Mark L. Wolf, a federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, announced this month that he was resigning to be able to speak openly about the Trump administration’s “assault on the rule of law” and the way that it poses an “existential threat to democracy.”

Immigration and the absorption of some of the brightest minds from around the world.

My dad, an Armenian refugee from Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States in 1952. Soon after, his landlady returned his rent, saying, “I can’t take money from a refugee.”

Such a welcoming spirit, while far from consistently applied, has enormously enriched the United States. Four of the Magnificent Seven tech companies are led by immigrants, and 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, according to the American Immigration Council.

[T]hese strengths are now being systematically undermined, especially universities, trade, the rule of law and recruitment of the world’s best minds.

The risks to America’s global pre-eminence get less attention than Trump’s White House ballroom, the government shutdown and his ugly statements about his opponents. But I’d argue that his most important legacy may be the damage he is doing to the underpinnings of our economic engines.

The Nobel in economic science went this year to three scholars who illuminated how innovation drives economic growth. They emphasized that this arises from immigration, from great universities, from openness to the world and to ideas — and consequently warned of “dark clouds” ahead.

Throughout history, we’ve repeatedly seen how great nations sometimes lost their energy and drive, slipping because of what Jawaharlal Nehru described in the context of India as a “gradual oozing out of hope and vitality.” In the year 1000, the greatest city in the world was Kaifeng in China, then the most important country in the world — but China and Kaifeng then lost ground for most of the next millennium before reviving in recent decades.

The United States may or may not experience such decrepitude, but decline seems to me more likely if America chokes trade and immigration while stifling universities. Without its secret sauce, America would be just one more tired old nation watching other, more youthful countries race past it. Those are the stakes.

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What if Democrats’ Big Shutdown Loss Turns Out to Be a Win?

The Senate Democrats who voted to end the federal government shutdown have faced blowback and criticism for their vote particularly since the bill passed did not cover extensions of the health care subsidies.  Thus, I understand the criticism.  On the other hand, SNAP benefits will be funded and federal employees - of which there are many in Virginia, including some of my relatives - will get paid thereby ending for now the financial nightmare for those living pay check to pay check as so many Americans now do.  Do I trust the Republican promise to have a vote on the health care subsidy extensions?  Of course not, but whether they keep the promise or fail to actually hold such a vote, the issue will remain in the minds of much of the public and more and more Americans facing huge premium spikes will have received confirmation of how bad things will be if something is not done.  Thus, the issue stays alive and meanwhile SNAP beneficiaries will not go hungry, something the Felon made clear he was perfectly fine with.  Affordability in general and health care costs in particular must stay in the public mindset and, with the Epstein scandal growing, both the Felon and his Republican sycophants will hopefully have even more pressure brought to bear on them.  A column in the New York Times suggests the Democrat "loss" may be less of a loss than some believe:

At first blush, the deal that paved the way to end the government shutdown this week looked exactly like the kind of feeble outcome many Democrats have come to expect from their leaders in Washington.

After waging a 40-day fight to protect Americans’ access to health care — one they framed as existential — their side folded after eight defectors struck a deal that would allow President Trump and Republicans to reopen the government this week without doing anything about health coverage or costs, enraging all corners of the party.

But even some of the Democrats most outraged by the outcome are not so certain that their party’s aborted fight was all for naught.

They assert that in hammering away at the extension of health care subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of next month, they managed to thrust Mr. Trump and Republicans onto the defensive, elevating a political issue that has long been a major weakness for them.

And in holding out for weeks while Republicans refused to extend the health tax credits and Mr. Trump went to court to deny low-income Americans SNAP food benefits, Democrats also honed their main message going into 2026: that Republicans who control all of government have done nothing to address voters’ concerns that the cost of living is too high.

“The end to this government shutdown does not solve their affordability problem,” said Amy Walter, the publisher and editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “A deal that included an extension of the subsidies would actually have helped.”

That vulnerability is clear in the actions of Republicans from states like New Jersey and Virginia, which elected Democratic governors by large margins in last week’s off-year elections.

Representatives Jen Kiggans of Virginia and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, two Republicans facing competitive races next year, recently sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson telling him that once the government was reopened, Republicans needed to “immediately turn our focus to the growing crisis of health care affordability and the looming expiration of the enhanced Affordable Care Act (A.C.A.) premium tax credits.”

It may turn out that the long-term outcome of the longest government shutdown in history will be a grand-scale political and policy defeat for Democrats. . . . . But in the shorter term, there could be benefits.

Senate Democrats believe that they held together long enough for Mr. Trump to reveal a new level of callousness in his refusal to fund food stamps for 42 million Americans who rely on the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. And they believe all of that helped contribute to a mini-blue wave last week, one that could continue if Democrats can keep the right issues at the forefront.

“We are not always a party that has great message discipline and we kept the conversation focused on the most important topic, which is Republican destruction of people’s health care,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview on Tuesday. “If that discipline remains, it helps people understand the chasm right now between Trump and Democrats.”

Mr. Murphy had been one of the most vocal Senate Democrats beseeching his colleagues to keep standing up to Mr. Trump and hold the line in the shutdown fight. . . . On Tuesday, Mr. Murphy said he still feared that any good will from voters who had been impressed watching Democrats actually fighting back might dissipate quickly now that they have folded. But Mr. Murphy said he was still optimistic that there had been some gains from the pain.

“There is still a net good that comes from this,” he said, noting that the December vote that Senate Republicans agreed to hold on extending the Obamacare tax credits will give Democrats another opportunity to spotlight their health care message. . . . “The silver lining of that agreement is that the issue doesn’t disappear,” he said.

Forcing the party in power to agree to policy demands in exchange for funding the government is a strategy that typically does not result in a win. Veterans of shutdowns past know this, and never expected Mr. Trump to cave to Democrats’ demands.

“The hostage taker never gets the policy demand they claim the shutdown is about,” said Patrick McHenry, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, who helped steer the House through multiple shutdown battles. “Do we even remember what the two shutdowns were about in 2018 and 2019?”

Mr. Trump may have a unique ability to keep his party together, but he also unites Democrats who might otherwise descend into a full-scale civil war.

“What motivates the Democratic base more than anything is Donald Trump,” Ms. Walter said. And that is likely to be more of a factor in next year’s midterm elections than any long-term disappointment in the capitulation of Senate Democrats.

“He is going to do and say so many things that are going to make the Democratic base angry and frustrated,” Ms. Walter added.

For now, Senate Democrats are looking toward a health care vote next month that they believe will either result in the extension of the subsidies they have sought, or — far more likely — with large numbers of Republicans casting a politically unpopular vote against helping Americans afford insurance.

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The Felon's Unconvincing Denials About Epstein

The House of Representatives is finally back in session, the federal government is reopening (at least through the end of January), and the discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the Epstein files now has the last needed vote.  How soon a floor debate on the release of the Epstein files will take place is an unknown, but yesterday both Republicans and Democrats released copies of emails authored by Epstein himself which indicate the Felon spent time with one of the Epstein victims and was aware of the sex trafficking and that Epstein seemingly offered to give dirt on the Felon to the Kremlin.  Definitely not stuff to exonerate one from real or perceived guilt . In response, the White House response has been both bizarre and contradictory and likely full of lies.  Even the Felon's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who usually lies with as much abandon as the Felon himself, offered up tortured responses to questioning.   The irony is that during the 2024 campaign the Felon talked up the release of the Epstein files (exciting the MAGA base by suggesting high level Democrats and liberals would be implicated) - the same files he says are a "hoax" while in the same breath validating one email in a strange way as showing his innocence.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the unconvincing denials.  Here are highlights:

This morning, House Democrats released emails from the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that claim, among other things, that Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein’s home with one of his victims. Later in the day, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if this was true—that Trump had spent hours at Epstein’s place with a sex-trafficking victim.

“These emails,” she replied, “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.”  That is not a no.

Of all of Trump’s scandals, his relationship with Epstein—if you ignore the stomach-churning human toll involved—may be the richest source of black comedy. Some of Trump’s most devoted worshippers chose the very issue of Epstein’s misdeeds and supposed cabal of elite backers as the fantasy onto which they projected a valiant role for their hero. Trump was meant to courageously release all of the available evidence for public scrutiny. Instead, this scandal has turned out to implicate him personally. (This is a risk inherent in building a personality cult around one of the worst human beings in the United States—almost any moral violation you pick will, statistically, have a high likelihood of appearing somewhere on his résumé.)

Trump’s defense in the matter has been that the Epstein files are a hoax, concocted to smear him by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” But he has also decided to let the matter drop because this conspiracy involving the CIA, the FBI, and two presidents to falsely connect him to a criminal millionaire who died suspiciously is simply too boring for anybody to care about. “I don’t understand it, why they would be so interested. He’s dead for a long time,” Trump said of Epstein in July.

The latest revelations have prompted Trump and his allies to update their defense. Their response makes as much sense as what came before.

It is not wrong to say that the timing of the release is related to the shutdown, in the sense that when the House returns to session, members who support releasing the Epstein files will have a majority. Democrats are clearly trying to pressure the handful of supportive House Republicans to maintain their support. Trump is lobbying them to abandon the petition, both privately and on his social-media channel.

But the revelations are a bit too damning to be dismissed as a news-cycle gambit, so the White House took a different tack a few hours later. It released a statement noting that the unnamed victim in the Epstein email who “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house was Virginia Giuffre, who “repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever.” . . . . The account later added, “Democrats redacted the victim’s name because the victim said Trump ‘couldn’t have been friendlier,’ was a ‘gentleman,’ and that she didn’t witness any wrongdoing.”

The White House’s response raises several questions. First, the conversation Giuffre recalled having with Trump took place at Mar-a-Lago. The email in question described an encounter at Epstein’s home, where the interaction may have included more than babysitting tips. Further, contextualizing this email by noting which girl it involved is a strange way to respond to a “fake” document

Epstein’s emails also imply that Trump was aware of his sex-trafficking scheme. “Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein wrote in an email. If I met a teenager who I knew to be a likely victim of a sex-trafficking ring, I’d like to think that I’d try to help them contact law enforcement or get away. Also, if I discovered that a close friend was running a sex-trafficking ring, maybe I’d reconsider our friendship, rather than engaging in long, pleasant chats with his victims.

The White House’s responses fit a pattern of suspicious behavior from the president on this matter. Trump has said of Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “I wish her well”—a strange thing to say about a convicted felon who systematically abused young girls. His administration has granted her a cushy upgrade for her stint in prison, including a transfer to a minimum-security camp and puppy visits. This has the appearance of a quid pro quo. Asked today if Trump is going to pardon Maxwell, Leavitt replied, “It’s not something he’s talking about or even thinking about at this moment in time.”

At this moment in time doesn’t exactly slam the door on that possibility.

Are the Epstein files suddenly real? Or are some of them real (and vindicating) and some of them fake (and incriminating)? All we know is that Trump wants us to stop talking about the subject. That’s usually what you want when the subject includes evidence that you have behaved in a manner beyond reproach.

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Same Sex Marriage Survives for Now

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court, without a written opinion, declined to take the appeal of Kim Davis (a four times married and mother of a child by one other than her then husband), the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Many in the LGBT community were very fearful that the extremist majority on the Court might overrule the Obergefell decision and allow the law to revert back to state control where by statute or constitutional amendment same sex marriage would again be illegal in numerous states, including Virginia.  While Monday's result has - at least for now - reduced some of the fear and dread within LGBT community that their rights might be stripped away, foreboding remains as the Felon's regime continues to assault diversity, equity and inclusion, both in private businesses and public institutions.   Unfortunately, the Christofascists and white "Christian" nationalists who want to inflict their religious beliefs on all Americans have vowed to continue to fabricate cases in order to continue to seek Obergefell's reversal.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the situation where hundreds of thousands of same sex married couples need to remain vigilant:

Gay Americans expressed relief on Monday after the Supreme Court denied a request to revisit a decade-old decision that established same-sex marriage as a national right. Conservative groups and state lawmakers said they were disappointed that the court was not taking up the issue now, but would continue to press legal challenges.

Before the denial, legal experts had speculated that the court was unlikely to reconsider the issue at this juncture. But the stakes were so high for families and same-sex couples, advocates of same-sex marriage said, that many people were on tenterhooks waiting for a decision.

The petition had come from Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the landmark decision in 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, many state laws that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying would snap back into effect. Congress enacted a federal statute in 2022 mandating that marriages performed by states be given recognition by the federal government, but that statute does not guarantee a right to marry.

“Do I think it’s a pure victory and we have nothing to worry about?” Jim Obergefell, the named plaintiff in the original case, said on Monday. “No, but I am taking the win today. Everyone across the country who believes that we deserve the right to marry the person we love, whoever we call home, we’re all breathing a bit easier.”

The number of married same-sex couples in the United States doubled in the last decade to 774,000, according to government data.

The possibility of a reversal on Obergefell led some same-sex couples to speed up their marriage plans, advocates said, and added fuel to state campaigns to repeal old statutes and constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. In Virginia, L.G.B.T.Q. advocates are hoping legislators will approve a state constitutional amendment in 2026 enshrining a right to marry, regardless of race, sex and gender.

“Today’s news is a relief, but we must always remain vigilant,” said Narissa Rahaman, executive director of Equality Virginia, a group that supports same-sex marriage.

A Gallup survey from May of this year found that support by Republicans for same-sex marriage had dropped to 41 percent from 55 percent in 2021. The Southern Baptist Convention, which is often seen as a strong indicator of conservative evangelical opinion, voted overwhelmingly earlier this year to call on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. And in half a dozen state legislatures across the country this year, Republican lawmakers have introduced resolutions urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.

The sponsor of one such measure, Representative Heather Scott, Republican of Idaho, said on Monday that she was undeterred by the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the issue this year.

Legal advocates of same-sex marriage said that the prospect of the court revisiting the issue served as a reminder that a right to same-sex marriage could not be taken for granted, even at a time when the first generation of married same-sex couples are, in some cases, starting to raise grandchildren.

There is no other clear case in the pipeline, legal experts said, for a direct challenge to Obergefell.

“It’s important to continue to make people aware of how important those family protections are for so many people,” said Jennifer Levi, a lawyer who worked on some of the nation’s first cases, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, on the right to same-sex marriage. “We have certainly seen the court shift its position in other contexts.”

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The Felon's Assault on the First Amendment

Numerous psychiatrists and psychologists - including the Felon's own niece - have diagnosed  the Felon as a malignant narcissist who is (i) centered only on his own imagined superiority and brilliance, and (ii) utterly uncaring towards others. Facts and individuals or institutions that depict the the truth about the Felon's unpopularity or cruel and ugly policies are not only unwelcomed but viewed as something to be censored and silenced through threats and intimidation. Indeed, anyone speaking the truth or exercising their constitutional freedom of speech is deemed and "enemy" or lumped into "antifa" - an organization that does not even exist - depicted as a threat to America.  Compared to the "red scares" in 1917 and later under Joseph McCarthy in some ways the Felon's assault on the First Amendment is more dangerous than what went before, yet in other ways the opposition to censorship and efforts to silence critics is perhaps stronger than post-WWI and during the 1950's. A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at where the nation finds itself under the Felon's would be authoritarian rule and some of the forces of opposition.  Here are article highlights:

Early last month, the White House convened a meeting of right-wing influencers for a livestreamed discussion of antifa and the danger they claim it poses. Over the course of the roundtable, President Donald Trump suggested that protests against him had been organized by mysterious funders, who he hinted could soon be in “deep trouble.” He complained about television networks that were biased against him but praised CBS, whose parent company had recently been purchased by a Trump-friendly billionaire. . . . “We took the freedom of speech away,” the president said. . . . . Trump’s comment did reflect a deeper truth about his administration’s effort to force an abrupt contraction of American civic space.

During the first 10 months of Trump’s second term in office, the federal government has cracked down on political expression—often understood as the most protected category of speech—with a persistence and viciousness reminiscent of some of the darkest periods of U.S. history. The administration has pushed for the prosecution of the president’s political opponents, fired government employees for taking positions perceived as less than entirely loyal to Trump, and barred certain law firms from working with the government because they displeased the president. It blocked AP reporters from the White House press pool because the wire service refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” It has investigated media companies and threatened to withhold merger approvals unless networks get rid of DEI policies; slashed billions of dollars in grants that it characterized as deriving from “immoral” and “illegal” DEI practices; and withheld funding for high-profile universities such as Harvard and Columbia with the goal of forcing their capitulation to the administration’s political agenda.

Following the murder of the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, in September, the administration called for the repression of left-leaning political views and revoked the visas of six foreigners who had criticized Kirk online. Months earlier, it snatched up and attempted to deport foreign students studying at U.S. universities who had criticized Israel, deriding them as “pro-Hamas.”

These attacks are dizzying in their variety. But they are best understood in the aggregate, as facets of a single campaign to destroy the American public sphere and rebuild it scrubbed of political opposition. In that respect, Trump’s crusade of repression bears a resemblance to the ongoing silencing of dissent in other backsliding democracies around the world, such as Turkey, Hungary, and India. After federal immigration agents grabbed Rumeysa Özturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, off a Boston-area street—apparently in retaliation for her co-authorship of an op-ed criticizing Israel—a group of Massachusetts members of Congress compared the abduction to the 2020 arrest of a dissident by secret police in Belarus. Cases such as Özturk’s, the representatives wrote in The New York Times, bring the country “closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.”

Yet the Trump administration’s effort to crush dissent is not without American precedent. On a single day in 1920, the Justice Department rounded up thousands of people for deportation because of their supposed Communist sympathies, though many had little or nothing to do with the Communist Party. In Boston, not far from where Özturk was arrested, some “aliens” were handcuffed and chained together while authorities marched them down the street in front of photographers. Those raids were the peak of what is now known as the first Red Scare—a period of paranoia about Communism and anarchism that began around the time of America’s entry into World War I. Three decades later, the country plunged into the second Red Scare, a rampage against supposed Communist plots often remembered by the name of its most famous proponent, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy. Accused “reds” were hauled in front of Congress, lost their jobs, and retreated from public life.

Our new Red Scare, like the first, is obsessed with immigration and the potential of left-wing political violence—then, anarchists and Communists; today, the imagined, shadowy antifa. Like the second, it is coupled with unease about changing norms regarding gender and sexuality. The anti-Communist fervor of the late 1940s and ’50s generated suspicion of women in positions of authority within government and drove thousands of gay and lesbian government employees out of the federal workforce, in what the historian David K. Johnson termed the “Lavender Scare.”

Now the Trump administration’s anxiety about the erosion of rigid gender roles manifests in its disdain for feminism—early in the administration, agencies removed material on women’s achievements from their websites—and in its aggressive hostility toward transgender people, whom the government has pushed out of the armed forces and erased from National Park Service websites. . . . . “The word ‘woke’ now performs the job that ‘communism’ did in the 1950s,” Silver told me over email.

In a country that prides itself on independence and freethinking, key pillars of civil society—universities, law firms, businesses—have proved quiescent in the face of a campaign to squelch dissent. The political scientist Steven Levitsky, a prominent scholar of democratic decline, graded the early response of civil society to Trump’s onslaught as a “D-minus.” Yet as methods of repression have evolved over the past 70 years, so, too, have methods of resistance. . . . . American civil society is in some ways weaker than many had hoped, but it is also stronger than it once was.

In June 1917, in a precursor to the Trump administration’s furor over student protests at Columbia University, three students were prosecuted for printing anti-draft pamphlets. (My great-great-uncle was among them.) Then, as now, government harassment was a warning to others not to make too much noise. Similarly, in the second Red Scare, after a group of prominent screenwriters, producers, and directors—the “Hollywood Ten”—were questioned about suspected Communist sympathies by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the movie industry began quietly paring back film scripts to avoid anything too left-wing.

Contemporary First Amendment law refers to this dynamic as a “chilling effect,” and there is a great deal of it in the United States right now.. . . . In Texas, where several professors and university administrators have been pushed out or otherwise punished following MAGA outrage, some academics say they are anxious about the potential career repercussions of teaching subjects as previously anodyne as the women’s suffrage movement and gender-bending comedies by Shakespeare. In Tennessee, a retired police officer spent more than a month in jail after sharing a Facebook meme in response to Charlie Kirk’s death. Large law firms are wary of affiliating themselves with politicized causes, lest they be targeted by Trump’s wrath . . .

The historians, lawyers, and scholars I spoke with were in marked agreement that the current moment is not just comparable to but even more damaging than previous Red Scares. Within higher education, today’s crackdown is “worse than McCarthyism—much worse,” Ellen Schrecker, a historian and the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, told me. Then, she explained, individual academics were scrutinized and fired for Communist ties. But today, the country is experiencing a “frontal attack on everything that has to do with universities and colleges,” Schrecker said.

This assault on higher education is best understood as a means of destroying a locus of political opposition. With growing political polarization along educational lines, college-educated voters have become more likely to vote for the Democratic Party. Trump’s solution is an attempted dismantling of the institutions that helped produce these voters in the first place—and a symbolic attack on institutions of knowledge and expertise that are inherently at odds with Trump’s model of governance by know-nothingism.

This overtly partisan cast distinguishes Trump’s campaign to crush dissent from America’s fits of anti-Communist paranoia in the early and mid-20th century, which were more bipartisan affairs. . . . The government’s legal tactics have changed since the first and second Red Scares, in large part because the protections offered by the contemporary First Amendment are far more robust. Today’s law of free speech itself evolved “as a reaction to the problems of the McCarthy Era,” the First Amendment scholar Genevieve Lakier recently wrote. For this reason, Trump would have far more difficulty, say, prosecuting Columbia students simply for handing out pamphlets.

The flip side is that political speech unambiguously by Americans, about America, receives strong legal protections. It’s here that Trump has come to rely on more indirect methods of pressure—chiefly involving the withholding of money. Universities are far more vulnerable to presidential pressure today than they were during the second Red Scare, thanks to the massive amount of federal funding that the government has poured into higher education over the past 70 years. Trump is now dangling the potential loss of that same funding over schools to get them to bend to his will, and in many cases it is working in his favor.

The Federal Communications Commission, meanwhile, has leveraged a consolidated media landscape by threatening to withhold merger approvals unless companies pledge fealty to Trump. FCC Chair Brendan Carr approved an $8 billion merger between the media giants Skydance and Paramount, which owns CBS, only after Paramount handed Trump $16 million to settle a baseless lawsuit and Skydance agreed to install a Trump-friendly ombudsman at the network.

When I spoke with Schrecker about her study of the second Red Scare, she pointed to Kimmel’s victory as an indication of the difference between the McCarthy era and today. During McCarthyism, “there was essentially no opposition,” she told me. “People either supported the purges, or else they were too afraid.” One representative anecdote in No Ivory Tower describes a graduate student at the University of Chicago who, during the ’50s, was unable to persuade frightened colleagues to sign a petition—not about any politically sensitive topic but for the university to install a vending machine in their laboratory. In contrast, after Disney pulled Kimmel from the air, petitions and calls for boycotts blossomed. The ACLU launched a campaign to “defend free speech,” and hundreds of actors and artists signed on.

Reading No Ivory Tower, I was struck by how little organizations such as the ACLU and the AAUP, the professors’ association, did to protect academics from McCarthy’s censorship. Today, both organizations have been aggressive in pushing back. The ACLU recently announced that it has filed more than 100 lawsuits against the second Trump administration; in addition to its lawsuit over attempted deportations of foreign students, the AAUP has filed suits against a variety of the administration’s efforts to target higher education. Many civic institutions have buckled under pressure, but the ruckus made by the others is far louder than any of the muted pushback against McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The institutions that initially caved have, paradoxically, tended to be bigger and wealthier—Paramount, Columbia University, prominent law firms. Such organizations “are in many instances actually more vulnerable, because they have more pain points—federal grants, licenses, merger approvals—that the Administration can use to exert leverage,” Fabio Bertoni, The New Yorker’s general counsel, writes in a reflection on why elite law firms gave in to Trump.

But it is also a story about another set of crucial changes in American life since this period: the maturation of litigating organizations such as the ACLU, along with legal and cultural shifts that have made Americans more comfortable with the idea of taking the government to court. . . . . “Civil liberties organizations have vastly more capacity” than they did in the ’50s, Epp explained over email, and that growth “helps to explain why the litigation against the Trump initiatives is so much more widespread than in the 1950s and early 1960s.” . . . . Litigation against contemporary attacks on democracy follows in that tradition. “Some of the institutions that have caved are simply ones that had never been tested with this kind of challenge,” Ifill said. “But for us, that’s kind of baked into the pie.”

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Virginia Republicans Turn on Each Other After Crushing Losses

In the wake of historic losses in last week's elections, Virginia Republicans are now play a blame game of who is responsible for the electoral disaster.  The irony is that none of them are blaming the true cause of their wide spread defeats: the Felon and, to a much lesser extent Glenn Youngkin.   The reality is that the Felon is detested by a majority of Virginians as are his ugly policies.  For his part, Youngkin oversaw Virginia's drop in business rankings, increased unemployment, book bans, efforts to harm LGBT students, the illegal appointment to members of university boards of visitors and other things that may have thrilled the MAGA base.  In short, Youngkin and his regime had few positives to point to in order to boost Winsome Sears who seemingly had no announced agenda and ran a campaign demonizing transgender individuals and trying to tie Abagail Spanberger to Jay Jones' text messages. Sears was a terrible candidate yet she was the best Virginia Republicans could get for the nomination.  Indeed, the entire statewide ticket ran only negative ads - some bordering on the preposterous - and never laid out a plan to move Virginia forward. And then there is the overall fact that none of the GOP candidates offered anything but cheering the Felon's policies (some quietly and others full throated support) and a plan to let Virginia drift and suffer under ugly policies flowing from the White House.  A piece in Politico looks at the intra-GOP blame game:

In Virginia, it’s Republicans’ turn to be lost in the wilderness, and they’re spreading blame for their drubbing.

Many say lackluster gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears was deeply flawed and didn’t focus enough on the economy. Some accuse popular GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin of failing to use more of his war chest to boost candidates. Others complain that the state party failed to employ an aggressive strategy — and a group of county party chairs is considering calling for the resignation of the Virginia Republican Party chair.

Basically, they blame everyone but President Donald Trump. “They just smoked us. I mean, gosh, they wiped us off the map,” said Tim Anderson, a Republican who lost a House of Delegates race in the battleground Virginia Beach. “It’s going to take four years to rebuild what happened on Tuesday.”

Anderson, who was elected to the House in 2021, said Earle-Sears’ lack of a “motivational message that excited voters to get off the couch” doomed Republicans running at every level, who were already facing political headwinds caused by DOGE-inflicted federal job losses, along with the government shutdown.

It’s a warning sign for Republicans across the nation ahead of the 2026 races, especially without Trump atop the ballot. The GOP lost decisively Tuesday in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Georgia, including in some reliably red areas — a shellacking that signals problems for the party as Democrats turn out in droves against Trump and his policies. Democrats are simultaneously trying to move past their own intraparty turmoil and continue hammering America’s affordability problem.

“The economy was the No. 1 issue,” said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, a Republican. “And having people talking about trans rights and the like isn’t what was moving the needle. [The message] needed to address the economy at this point, and I think the administration and Republican Congress need to give that focus to get this midterm under control.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Earle-Sears blanketed the airwaves with ads characterizing Spanberger as being for “they/them”, echoing messaging from Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Virginia Republicans were already bracing for a tough November, given that the state’s off-year elections are traditionally a repudiation of the party in power in Washington and Trump lost Virginia by five points in 2024. Their predicament worsened when the president levied global tariffs, hurting rural areas of Virginia that rely on manufacturing and agriculture. Add to that cuts to the state’s federal workforce under the Department of Government Efficiency and the longest shutdown in U.S. history, and the party’s situation became dire.

“The majority of Virginia voters don’t like the president, and many of them have a visceral hatred for him and his governing style,” said DJ Jordan, a GOP strategist referring to Democratic voters who served as chief of staff for Jason Miyares, the attorney general who lost to a scandal-clad Democrat on Tuesday. Jordan was referring to Democratic voters.

Republicans are still unwilling to criticize Trump or his policies, but some conceded that the Democratic base was energized in opposition to the president.

“The state is a blue state, and the fact that we were running while Republicans are in the White House, history shows that that is not a recipe for success,” said a Republican strategist who was involved in the races and was granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Tuesday’s results dealt a deeper blow to the party than anticipated. Earle-Sears, who lagged in fundraising and never earned Trump’s direct endorsement, lost to Abigail Spanberger by 15 points, the largest victory by a Democrat in Virginia in decades and a bigger margin than most polls predicted.

“This blew past our worst case scenario of everything,” said a Republican who worked on some of the races.

In perhaps the biggest setback for the party’s long-term future, the GOP lost 13 seats in the House of Delegates, putting Democrats on a glide path to enact their agenda in Richmond — including mid-cycle redistricting to counter Trump’s push to make congressional maps more favorable to Republicans. Five of those state seats won by Democrats went for Trump in 2024, a sign of dissatisfaction among some Republican voters.

“They should have seen this coming,” said Loudoun County GOP Chair Scott Pio, who believes the party should have focused more on converting new voters than simply turning out the base. “Their strategy was quite ineffective and it shows. Now Virginia is a terribly blue state.”

“Everyone will want to blame Winsome. That’s fine, if that’s how they want to publicly spin,” one of the strategists said. “Everyone needs to take a serious look and realize that that is not at all the full story. The full story is we were too excited on our own brand and forgot to run a campaign up and down the ballot.”

Despite the sniping, Republicans are banking on Democrats pursuing a progressive agenda in Richmond that will alienate moderate voters.

“We can go on offense now — we can absolutely smack them upside the head every day,” said a Republican involved with the House races. “They caught the car and let’s see what they do with it.”

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The Consequences of MAGA's Cruelty, Bigotry and Rage

Under the Felon's and today's MAGA controlled Republican Party, cruelty and bigotry towards those deemed "other" by the increasingly deplorable MAGA and white Christian nationalist base - namely, non-whites, non-Christians and non-heterosexuals among others - and  rage that any anyone other than white right wing Christians achieve financial and social success are the movements main stock in trade. Indeed, in a regime that whines about anti-Semitism, acceptance of Neo-Nazis and admirers of Hitler is growing., further confirming the moral bankruptcy of so much of the MAGA base which wears Christianity on its sleeves yet ignores Christ social gospel teachings.  As CNN reports, millions of Americans are seeing health insurance premiums skyrocket and critical medial research funding has been slashed, all so billionaires and the ultra-wealthy can enjoy huge tax cuts. As SNAP payments that benefit some 16 million children and many among the working poor whose employers pay pitiful wages and in effect have taxpayers underwrite their employees, are being held up and are in limbo. Add in the horrific deportation actions of ICE and it times it seems cruelty is the unifying theme behind the Felon's and GOP's policies.  Yes, last Tuesday's election results appear to be a repudiation of the Felon and MAGA, but so much damage is being done. Indeed, as Vice is reporting, 63% of adults ages 18 to 34 have considered leaving the country this year because of “the state of the nation.”  and among parents, more than half—53%—say the same. A column in the New York Times looks at the evil consuming the GOP and ponders whether the situation can be turned around:

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, must be confused. Last month, he turned to the most reliable move in the Republican crisis-management playbook, and it didn’t work. On Oct. 30, three days after his friend Tucker Carlson released a softball interview with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and perhaps the most notorious fan of Adolf Hitler in American public life, Roberts posted a video online that decried cancel culture. . . . “That includes Tucker Carlson,” Roberts continued, “who remains — and as I have said before — always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

It’s hard to overstate how much this approach tends to work in the modern Republican Party. The hatred of the left — and of conservatives who are critical of Donald Trump — is so overwhelming that even the most basic acts of moral hygiene are considered weak or woke, or worse.

Even if you are uncomfortable with the words or actions of your fellow Republicans, there is relentless pressure to swallow your tongue. There should be no enemies to your right. The left is the true existential threat to the United States.

When Roberts, who was also a guiding force of Project 2025, recorded his video, he could be forgiven for thinking that neither Carlson nor Fuentes was particularly toxic on the right. . . .Fuentes, for his part, dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago along with Kanye West in 2022, and Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference that same year.

But Roberts miscalculated. His statement tore the Heritage Foundation apart. Facing a staff revolt, he issued a new statement more clearly condemning Fuentes (but still leaving Carlson alone), and when that didn’t quell the uprising, he held an all-staff meeting that quickly degenerated into an airing of grievances, with some Heritage employees eviscerating Roberts and passionately condemning the moral decline of the conservative movement and others — often with equal emotion — standing by his side.

Roberts remains Heritage’s president and has vowed to stay, but senior foundation employees have resigned, the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has severed its ties with the group, and vast segments of the right are in open revolt against both Roberts and Carlson.

Readers might be a little bit stumped. Wait, this is what’s splitting the right? A podcast conversation? It’s not that dialogues like this don’t matter (they do), but after everything that America has seen and endured since 2015, why now?

The answer is rooted in part in the unstable bargain that millions of conservatives made with themselves and with America to keep supporting Trump.

First, as a bit of background, Trump’s rise not only eviscerated the idea that there should be any kind of character test for participation in Republican politics, it also resulted in an aggressive, vicious purge from the party and the movement of anyone who attempted to hold Trump accountable for depravity and lawlessness. Some of us have even been told that we’ve abandoned our Christian faith for opposing Trump.

Many of the conservatives who remained didn’t want to abandon the president, but they also didn’t want to completely abandon decency, either. So they chose a third way. Trump receives special dispensation (witness the much more muted response to Trump’s dinner with Fuentes, especially among Republican lawmakers), but standards still apply to everyone else. Other Republicans have to toe the line.

But this approach suffers from a fatal flaw. A movement, especially one that verges on an outright cult of personality, is defined by its leader, not by its rank and file. And when the leader is lawless and depraved, then efforts to contain his influence while preserving his power are doomed to fail.

The proof is everywhere. Throughout the Trump era, many of the most prominent voices of right-wing America have only become shriller, angrier and, yes, more racist and more antisemitic. The right-wing media universe is culturally different in 2015 than it was in 2025 — substantially so.

The balance of power has flipped upside down. The fringe has become mainstream, and the mainstream has become fringe.

And now, with the end of Trump’s presidency coming into view, there is an increasing number of conservatives who fear that the movement has been and is being completely redefined — not just in Trump’s image, but in Carlson’s and Fuentes’s as well. And now some of these conservatives are speaking up.

I want to believe that a large number of conservatives are in the process of waking up. They’re finally questioning what their movement has become.

But I’m rather afraid that they’re too late. One sign that might be the case is that virtually every person who’s raised a voice against Carlson has a far smaller audience than he does. Since Carlson posted his interview with Fuentes less than two weeks ago on X, it has racked up almost 18 million views. On YouTube it has 5.6 million views.

Compounding the problem, there are many prominent right-wing influencers who won’t explicitly defend Carlson or Fuentes but will scold the people who are confronting them. . . . Got that? We can’t condemn good old Tucker for elevating an actual fan of Hitler in front of many millions of people because that will distract from taking on the real enemy, Jake Tapper.

Making the problem worse, the fight for the future of the Republican Party is taking place only after many of its most thoughtful and decent members have been excommunicated. Millions upon millions of Republicans have been told that these brave men and women — Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, to name just three — are traitors to the cause.

The Republican rank and file have also been conditioned to dismiss moral arguments against MAGA as sanctimonious and complaints about Republican racism and antisemitism as inherently leftist. Hearts are hardened, ears shut.

I don’t know if Roberts will survive at Heritage, but I do know that Carlson and Fuentes and their constellation of friends and allies are far too popular to cancel or even to contain.

The fight for the future of the Republican Party is underway, but until the demand for decency reaches toward the very top of the movement, then Trump’s malignant influence will continue to metastasize, and he’ll hand the baton to a woman or a man (including, possibly, Carlson himself) who extends Trump’s legacy of cruelty, bigotry and rage.