Saturday, July 11, 2026
Friday, July 10, 2026
MAGA’s Birthright Meltdown Is in Full Effect
On July 4, the world’s richest man made an ominous declaration. To follow Elon Musk’s X feed is to peer into a dystopian reality where immigrants are murderous brutes, Black-on-white crime is endemic and the “makers” in America are under siege from the “takers,” the people who live merely as parasites off the productivity of others.
But on the 250th birthday of his adopted country, he did something that might seem surprising but is entirely consistent with his hateful, paranoid trajectory: He turned on the American founding. A science fiction author and X personality named Devon Eriksen wrote, “Elon, this is the moment where you’re supposed to wise up and abandon classical liberalism. If you let takers vote, they will not only take more and more, they will make it more and more rewarding to be a taker, and they will convert more and more makers into takers, forever.” “Universal suffrage leads to universal suffering,” he concluded.
“Classical liberalism,” for those not up on political terms of art, refers to the philosophy of the American founding, the creation of a rights-based republic of democratic rule restrained by constitutionally protected liberties. And what was Musk’s response to this direct assault on democracy and American liberty? “I have wised up,” he said.
I thought almost immediately of Peter Thiel, another wealthy right-wing mogul. . . . . all the way back in 2009, he wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
That’s why the founders created a government of limited powers restrained by, among other things, the Bill of Rights. But they also believed in the social contract theory of government, in the idea that governments gain their legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
Freedom and democracy aren’t incompatible; they’re inseparable.
Musk’s and Thiel’s views would be notable enough, especially given their extraordinary political influence on the right, but their views aren’t coming from nowhere. They’re rooted in a profound sense of pessimism and despair that is spreading throughout the right.
From the inception of the MAGA movement, it has attracted a cohort of explicitly postliberal academics and intellectuals. These are often people who believe that liberalism itself — the belief in a rights-based approach to democracy — is deeply and profoundly flawed.
America, they believe, is dying — if it’s not dead already — and they hate the nation it’s becoming. How many times, for example, have we heard President Trump say that “you won’t have a country anymore” if he loses or if his plans are thwarted? In his mind (and in the minds of millions of his supporters), the fate of the country always hangs in the balance.
When the Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship decision last week, Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s most powerful adviser, said that the court read the Constitution to require “national self-obliteration” and added for good measure that the ruling was a “deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”
Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, a right-wing web magazine, responded to the ruling by suggesting a series of possible measures, including, incredibly enough, the “dissolution of the union” and the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”
And, of course, no summary of the right-wing reaction to the ruling would be complete without overt racism. A MAGA X user writing as I Am Leah wrote that “18 years from now, my kid’s votes will be canceled out by a third-world cockroach whose cockroach mom arrived here three minutes ago.”
Don’t think for a moment that the birthright citizenship ruling was any kind of tipping point. In fact, it was more or less business as usual. Darkness covers the right. On June 28 a podcaster and columnist for The Blaze, another right-wing outlet, wrote that the assassination of Charlie Kirk “should have started a literal civil war between red and blue America.”
Kirk’s assassination was an evil act, but the idea that it should have triggered civil war in this country is deranged.
The people above — who range from a sometime trillionaire to billionaires to government officials to journalists and pundits — aren’t exceptional on the populist right. They’re emblematic of a movement that, like Trump, is constantly arguing that this country is minutes away from midnight and that only the most extreme measures can yank America back from the brink of destruction.
Part of the rage seems to be rooted in a sense that MAGA came oh so close to winning. Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “The fact that it was 5-4 — so agonizingly close — just underscored that the legal community on the right and left has been so wrong for so many years, saying this was going to be a 9-0 ruling against President Trump.”
But that’s not quite right. Yes, there were only five unqualified votes for the constitutional status quo, but there were six total votes for birthright citizenship (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that birthright citizenship was required by statute, not the Constitution), and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent indicated that he was mainly concerned with citizenship for the children of temporary visitors.
The conservatism of my youth positioned itself in direct opposition to Communism in both its Soviet and its Chinese forms. Fascism (and everything like it) was dead, and no one wanted to revive it.
How wrong I was. Parts of the right still posture as patriots, but they have imagined a different kind of patriotism, one that loves the country but scorns its creed. They — like Musk on July 4 — reject the classical liberal founding or at least de-emphasize its importance compared with the ancestral lineage of its citizens.
Vance is making a version of the argument that a certain subset of Americans — sometimes called heritage Americans — enjoys a superior claim to American citizenship. At its most extreme ends, proponents of the idea have even assigned letter grades to your citizenship based on the length of your American family roots.
As my friend and former Dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote, this is a form of identity politics: “It literally grades individuals on a metric they have zero control over. It’s no different than assigning grades based on skin color, sex or height.”
And if America isn’t rooted in its creed — and if certain classes of citizens have a superior claim to their American identity than other citizens — then it is a short trip to believing that the American government exists to serve only the favored class, the “real Americans” who make up, say, the MAGA base.
In this formulation, true patriotism isn’t the preservation of the creed; it’s the preservation of the people. And once you see this distinction, MAGA’s entire governing philosophy makes infinitely more sense.
Why crack down so aggressively on immigration? Immigrants — especially those from the global south — are not and can never be part of the people. They’re the “invaders” whom progressives want to use to replace the “real” American electorate.
[B]irthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen.
Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. You can see it in the constant anger against immigrants. You can see it in the racism of constantly highlighting crimes committed by Black and brown people, citizens and immigrants alike.
I don’t want to denigrate the idea of respecting one’s ancestors. . . . . . I can be proud of where I came from without believing there’s anything magic about my blood. While I want to live up to the best parts of my ancestors’ example, they don’t make me any better as an American than my friend Leo, a Mexican immigrant, who served side by side with me in Iraq. The worth of my citizenship is judged by the value of my choices, not by the identity of my parents, much less that of my great-grandparents.
America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address — these are the proclamations that define who we are. They are the core of the American creed, and without that creed, America might retain its name, but it will not retain its nature.
Thursday, July 09, 2026
Iran, Not the Felon, Is in Control of This War
If [the Felon] Donald Trump ever had any control over the war he started with Iran, he’s lost it. The Iranians are now setting the terms of this conflict and are routinely humiliating the American president. The “cease-fire” Trump declared last month—a move probably meant to both soothe international markets and avert legislative action from the United States Congress—never really existed, because neither side ever ceased firing. The situation is now back to a kind of slow-motion punch-up: In the past few days, the Iranians struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans attacked some 80 targets in Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now claims it hit some 85 U.S.-affiliated targets in Bahrain and Kuwait.
This morning, Trump was asked whether the memorandum of understanding with Iran, the document that was supposed to provide the foundation for negotiations, was dead. Trump hesitated a bit and said: “That’s a very interesting question. To me, I think it’s over. I don’t wanna deal with them anymore. They’re scum, you know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people.”
Last month, of course, Trump had nothing but nice things to say about the Iranian leaders. “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.” . . . . The MOU was practically an instrument of American capitulation that the Iranians could have drafted themselves, but Trump wanted to get out of the war, and so he signed it—appropriately enough, at Versailles.
The Iranians have made clear that they don’t care about the MOU or, for that matter, what Trump thinks or wants. They are willing to inflict more damage on the Gulf states, and they’re willing to accept damage in return. These are signs of a state directing a war rather than reacting to one. Iran is measuring costs and risks. It is pursuing the achievable goals of regime survival, control of the Strait, and preservation of its nuclear program.
The Trump administration, for its part, bumbled into this war without a strategy. Instead, it relied on bad assumptions, outdated information, and the president’s gut feelings. It assumed—because the president wished very hard—that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who encouraged Trump to go to war) ignored years of analysis and war-gaming from the military and the intelligence community, and then were caught flat-footed when the Iranians closed the strait and choked the international economy, the one thing everyone else in the world knew they would do. . . . . the United States is now merely depleting its stocks of expensive ordnance to little strategic effect.
Even by his usual standards, Trump has been incoherent in Ankara, Turkey, where he’s attending a NATO summit. Over the course of 24 hours, he has renewed his demands for the United States to own Greenland; confused Iran with Japan; and confused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Little wonder, then, that he seems unable to give sensible answers to questions about the renewed hostilities. When asked today about more attacks on Iran, Trump said: “You know, normally I wouldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t tell you, but you know what, there’s not a thing they can do about it. So, the answer is probably.” Not exactly an answer full of fire and fury.
In other words: I don’t know what else to do, so we’ll do some more strikes and then see what Iran does.
This is not the approach of a president who’s running a war; this is the flailing of a man who’s in over his head and is reacting to events, rather than guiding them. Lest this kind of equivocation lead the Iranians to doubt Trump’s resolve, the president has added that he’s still considering two other terrible ideas: an invasion of Iranian territory, and a campaign of probable war crimes.
First, he has returned to talking about seizing Kharg Island, an operation that would require a considerable commitment of ground forces and inevitably lead to U.S. casualties. Second, he has again raised the possibility of striking Iran’s infrastructure, including bridges and desalination plants. Such installations, if they are significantly contributing to Iran’s military effort, might be considered legitimate targets. Trump, however, seems to have in mind immiserating the civilian population as a means of driving the regime to the table—which would be a serious violation of the laws of war.
Fortunately, Trump is unlikely to do any of this. Hours after his various responses, he was asked if the war was back on in full force. His answer was revealing about his limited ability to control the circumstances of the conflict, and a clear signal to the Iranians not to worry about anything he says, because he’ll always change his mind.
At any rate, Trump capped these remarks by assuring his audience, and perhaps even those listening in Tehran: “We’re not looking for long term.”
I taught strategy at the Naval War College to military officers and senior civilians for a long time. The subject does not have a lot of hard-and-fast rules; wars share common characteristics but each conflict has its own peculiarities and exigent circumstances. One good guideline, however, is to avoid threatening your enemy and then immediately announcing that you really have no stomach for a fight. Strong leaders keep their own counsel and let their actions speak for them; weak leaders make threats and then broadcast how much they don’t want to carry them out.
Trump is now going through something like the stages of wartime grief: Denial that America failed; anger, which has led to renewed attacks; and then bargaining, as if the Iranians could somehow be bought off like a gang of recalcitrant construction workers in New York. None of it has worked. Depression and acceptance await.
Wednesday, July 08, 2026
Ominous Goal of the Right’s "Religious Liberty” Crusade
“Religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years,” [the Felon]
President Donald Trumpannounced to the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26. . . . Great nations have God and religion, and, he added, “if you don’t have that, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?” It sounded almost like a threat.That same day, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission delivered a full draft of its 224-page report, the centerpiece of which is “12 Recommendations to Strengthen Religious Liberty for All Americans.” Those recommendations include the creation of a Justice Department “religious liberty task force,” production of “Know Your Rights” posters, repealing the Johnson Amendment, and creating “religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals.”
The commission, housed in the DOJ, was established via executive order last year to advise the White House Faith Office and Domestic Policy Council by offering suggestions for how to “preserve and enhance religious liberty” in U.S. law and public life. Chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and vice-chaired by Ben Carson, it is primarily composed of right-wing activists. A few have legal experience; others are prominent religious leaders, politicians, authors—and Dr. Phil.
The report itself is, as legal scholar Micah Schwartzman has put it, “an embarrassing document” (although “shameless” might be more fitting). Still, as we have learned and relearned over the past decade, government officials do not have to be thoughtful, competent, or serious to do real damage. Slapdash and unserious as the report might be, it does its job: laying out how to use the cause of religious liberty to advance right-wing goals.
For over two decades, the Christian conservative legal movement, led by well-funded groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and with help from the Roberts court, has transformed the idea of religious freedom. . . . . Religious liberty is a banner under which the administration and its allies will continue to undermine other civil rights, dismantle public goods, and insulate certain favored citizens from public accountability.
The premise of the commission’s work is “a simple but profound truth: religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.” In recent decades, high-profile cases have dramatized the conflict between individual religious freedom and the public good. The religious belief and speech of cake bakers, website designers, and licensed counselors—to refer to three Supreme Court cases in which ADF successfully sought exemption from or contested Colorado’s civil rights laws—come into conflict with the civil rights of others, particularly LGBTQ people. But, the commission argues, the “Founding Fathers recognized that religious liberty is not merely a private benefit for believers, but a public good for the nation.”
Here, they sidestep the fact that private benefits do in fact conflict with public goods—when business owners discriminate against their potential clients, when tax dollars are funneled to discriminatory private institutions and away from public schools, or when religious groups flout public health mandates during a pandemic—and instead assert that, because religion is ultimately good, religious liberty benefits everyone. . . . Church and state should not be completely separate but, “in reality,” should “strengthen and support one another.” There is no wall between the two, the commission concludes, but a “bridge.”
The report is divided into 14 chapters, most of which are devoted to a particular issue or arena of public life. . . . . The content of each is drawn largely from the commission’s seven hearings held over the past year. These hearings primarily served as platforms for supposedly persecuted believers—each one a potential “religious freedom celebrity”—to offer testimonials, with occasional subject-area experts adding their analysis. . . . Chapters conclude with pictures from the hearings of these heroes. It reads like a book of martyrs with policy recommendations.
The testimonies reveal their uses. . . . The commission wants Americans to be proud of religion, and of religious liberty. Perhaps even more than wanting to feel pride, they want some people not to feel shame. They want anti-sociality without consequent social stigma. As religious studies scholar Donovan Schaefer has written, for some conservatives, “it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.”
Following this line of argument, religious studies scholar Finbarr Curtis explains, “Trumpism is the response to the fear that someone somewhere is threatening to take something that is rightfully yours. As a vigorous response to threats, Trump’s illiberalism makes his supporters feel safe.” The message of the commission’s report is that these threats abound, from vaccine mandates and “transgenderism” and “bad actors in the government and within institutions,” but the Department of Justice will protect you.
Even in this boom time for religious liberty, with religion’s stock going up, some claimants still lose their cases. In fact, the named claimant in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the most recent religious freedom case at the Supreme Court, lost. And a landmark law—2000’s Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA—was significantly restricted. Naturally, it was a case that spelled out exactly who could expect to enjoy religious freedom and who should not.
The Public Religion Research Institute has found . . . . “In the U.S., when there is a conflict, the rights and religious freedom of Christians have priority over the rights and religious freedom of non-Christians and non-religious Americans.” Perhaps this is the “culture of Christian Nationalism” of which Perryman warns.
While Christian nationalist ideology might be a factor, the Religious Liberty Commission is better understood as a right-wing project. If its goal is to install Christian supremacy, it is only as a route to empower private actors to subvert the public good. It seeks to exempt certain people—Christians, yes, but more importantly conservatives—from public accountability, and from feeling bad about abridging the civil rights of disfavored groups. It advocates siphoning funds from public schools and rerouting them toward private institutions . . . .
It seeks to create a culture of fear and suspicion and, in so doing, alleviate the fears of anti-pluralists, their feelings of loneliness, exclusion, and shame. Throughout, the message is clear: Get religion. If you don’t, the commission suggests, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?
Tuesday, July 07, 2026
Belgium Ousts USA From World Cup In 4-1 Rout
According to soccer’s rules, as interpreted by most people who actually understand them, the red card decision against Mr. Balogun might have been wrong, but it should not have been reversible.
That’s until Mr. Trump called Mr. Infantino and suggested that the rule of law in soccer, just like the rule of law in the United States, doesn’t apply to him. According to the rarely used Article 27, which allows FIFA to suspend a disciplinary measure, the incorrect ruling that could not be corrected was in fact correctable.
Mr. Trump, of course, bragged about beating the charges and getting Mr. Balogun back for the critical knockout match against Belgium in Seattle. Mr. Balogun, it should be noted, is a Brooklyn-born player who was raised in England and plays in France for A.C. Monaco. He’s an American citizen by birthright, the kind of person targeted by the case the president lost last week in the Supreme Court.
We’re the fools to think that Mr. Infantino, a supposed reformer after the scandal-filled regime of his predecessor Sepp Blatter, would make FIFA more aboveboard. His organization has handed soccer’s biggest tournament to both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the petro-potentates of Qatar, and Mr. Infantino has turned the whole thing into an ever more gigantic money machine. He presented Mr. Trump with the first FIFA Peace Prize, after all; nearly three months later, of course, the peace prize winner would start a war with Iran by bombing schoolchildren. A friend noted that he has now won the FIFA Appease Prize, too.
This is a very good American team playing in what has been, to this point, a wildly successful, fairly played tournament. We can compete with just about anyone, although it’s also fair to say we are still not part of the elite, the way Belgium is.
A victory over Belgium would indeed be a measure of achievement, another mile marker passed on the journey of progress the sport has made in the United States. And perhaps one forever tarnished by our commander in cheat.
A piece at NBC Sports continues the theme:
Some will dance around it. I’ll say it. The intervention of the president in the suspension of U.S. striker Flo Balogun’s suspension for the game killed the vibe. It removed the justifiable chip on the U.S. team’s shoulder arising from an unwarranted red card on Balogun and shifted it to Belgium’s squad. The Belgian players had something extra. The U.S. team simply couldn’t match it.
Would it have been any different if the Commander-in-Chief hadn’t tried to twist the arm of FIFA president Gianni Infantino? There’s no way to know. But it couldn’t have been any worse than it was tonight for the U.S. team.
And so the man who would have claimed full credit if the U.S. had won deserves at least some of the blame for the loss. He lit a fire for the Belgian team that it otherwise wouldn’t have had.
There’s no way to prove it objectively. But if you followed the story and watched all of the game, it’s a conclusion that is hard not to reach.
Monday, July 06, 2026
Sunday, July 05, 2026
The Rising Price of the Felon's Anti-Science Agenda
There’s a well-known scene from a 2001 episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants” in which a mob of fish mistakes a feeble old man for a bully and attacks him. The gag happens again, leading a blue fish to famously quip, “How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?” As far as metaphors go, it’s a pretty apt one for how pathogens, parasites and other infectious organisms serve as lessons for [the Felon]
President Donald Trumpon basic principles of public health. The problem is he’s seemingly incapable of learning — and Americans are paying the price.The reason I’m referencing a children’s cartoon is that this is the level of intellectual discourse that science has been reduced to under the MAGA and MAHA movements spurred by Trump and lackeys like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most of this anti-science policy amounts to plugging their ears and going “nah nah nah” whenever something about climate change, vaccines or racial injustice is mentioned.
The rest is standard schoolyard bullying, which, as a new tracker from the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrates, has resulted in 574 attacks on science and 187 potential scientific integrity violations since Trump began his second term. These attacks include censorship, appointing cronies to key agency positions, gutting regulations and funding and targeting scientists based on identity. Consequently, the last year and a half has been a disaster in almost all realms of scientific progress and public health in the U.S.
The examples of this administration flouting science and reaping the painful consequences are nearly endless and date back to Trump’s first term, when he flouted virus surveillance programs, essentially inviting COVID-19 in, then did little to stop it and let it flourish into a pandemic that has killed at least 1.1 million Americans and counting. But for more recent cases, we need only look at the last few weeks and boy, have the consequences of an anti-science agenda piled on recently.
To take an easy example, there’s the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool scandal, in which “renovations” ordered by Trump resulted in a nauseating algae bloom, because whoever the president hired to paint the pool bottom didn’t seem to grasp how this would trap heat and provide the perfect conditions for algae to thrive. This science experiment is far less consequential than the record-breaking Ebola crisis that has been worsened by cuts to foreign aid, for example, but it’s no less anti-science. Rather than admit he doesn’t understand basic pool science, Trump’s response has been to arrest at least six people and float accusations against rogue vandals, a “painfully stupid” conspiracy theory, . . .
This is far from the only rake the Trump admin has stepped on in recent days. There’s also the Pentagon announcement last week that it is reversing course on flu vaccines, making them mandatory yet again. This comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the shots optional in late April. It only took about two months for a serious outbreak to occur: this month, nearly 300 people have been sickened at Lackland Air Force Base in Bexar County, Texas, which has so far hospitalized four people and may have resulted in one death (the case is still being investigated).
But Hegseth seems to think you can deflect viruses with creatine powder and tanning lotion. Vaccines are “woke” — until you have hundreds of people sickened for no reason when there is a safe and effective vaccine that millions of people take each year. If more people got vaccinated, flu season wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is every year in America. We collectively and effectively choose to get sick, slowing down the economy and killing vulnerable people, because some of us don’t like getting shots. I’ve argued before that the lack of flu vaccine uptake is one of many aspects of the American death cult, but for this shot in particular, mandates are unlikely to work on the broader public.
On the topic of vaccines that probably should be mandatory, measles continues to wreak havoc across the U.S., with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 2,134 confirmed cases this year. In 2025, there were just shy of 2,300 cases, which means 2026 is almost certainly going to outpace that record. Approximately 93% of these measles patients are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccine status. The disease, which was once eliminated from the U.S., is now so embedded in our society that we have essentially lost that measles elimination status, whether anti-vaccine health officials like Kennedy acknowledge it or not, as Dr. Jess Steier argued in a recent op-ed for CIDRAP.
Meanwhile, Kennedy is working overtime to further restrict access to vaccines by rewriting the charter of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a federal committee that provides guidance on vaccines. If the ACIP votes to remove vaccines from a free vaccination program — unfortunately, a real possibility — more than half of US kids would lose access to that immunization, experts warn. Once again, it’s the American people who pay the price of the Trump admin’s anti-science agenda.
Yet another example of Trump’s anti-science policies coming back to bite him — this time, somewhat literally — is the return of New World Screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that bore into the open flesh wounds of its victims. For decades, the U.S. has maintained a program in which these flies are bred in a lab, bathed in sterilizing radiation and released around Panama, which prevents the insect from creeping northward.
[C]uts to these programs and Trump’s antagonism toward Mexico, Panama and other Latin American countries threatened to bring the parasite back to the United States. Now it’s happening, with the latest update from the Department of Agriculture reporting 27 cases in the last 30 days. It may not sound like much, but it will be a multi-billion-dollar effort to contain. The response from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been, predictably, to blame immigration and former President Joe Biden.
When cases of screwworm began popping up in Mexico in 2024, Biden’s USDA shuttered southern ports of entry to live cattle imports to prevent the spread. Trump reopened those ports in Feb. 2025 to appease the cattle industry, while staffing cuts at the USDA and sluggish funding reviews have arguably contributed to screwworm’s return.
Screwworm is mostly a concern for cattle ranchers — and given the outsized climate impacts of factory farms, it would be a good thing if people eat less meat — but it still stands as yet another embarrassing neglect of science and public health that is egg on Trump’s face. It’s certainly bad news for the ranchers and farmers that President Screwworm has consistently screwed over.
How many times must he learn his lesson? Trump’s hostility to science isn’t just ignorant; it’s destructive. But it seems like no matter how many times a totally predictable result blows up in his face, he won’t stop the rancor toward science. He won’t stop attacking scientific leaders, cutting their funding or hampering their ability to do their job. He allows his flunkies to attack proven technologies like vaccines or deny the catastrophic decay of our environment due to burning fossil fuels, and on and on.
Trump is only tightening his grip on science, recently proposing rule changes to how federal research is funded under the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently overseen by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. The rule changes would not only weaken the peer review process and forbid international scientific collaboration, but they would also ban research on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion. The blowback is impossible to predict, but if the last 18 months have indicated anything, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
These are far from the only enterprises that seek to rebuild what the Trump admin has demolished, and they all need our support. Unfortunately, it won’t be nearly enough to undo the damage — some of which could take decades to repair, with a staggering death toll in its wake — unless we finally rein in this out-of-control, anti-science crusade once and for all.
Saturday, July 04, 2026
Trump’s 250th Is a Festival of Slop History
As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.
Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. . . . . he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.
Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.
Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”
The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, . . . . Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.
[O]ther action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.
Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.
Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.
The Paradox of Surging Gay Literature/Films
In early June, Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican firebrand from Tennessee, did something he often does: Post a message on X that was sure to shock. “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.”
But unlike some of his other recent virulent posts — for example, about Muslim Americans — this one drew condemnation from many members of his own party, including Mike Johnson, the House speaker.
The post’s brief life spoke to the divisions within the Republican Party on same-sex marriage. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision protecting gay marriage, turns 11 this year, and there is little indication that establishment Republicans are questioning it. At the same time, Christian conservatives, like Mr. Ogles, now a crucial part of Mr. Trump’s coalition, are pursuing that goal with renewed energy and ambition, often using the push for trans rights as a new front in the debate.
Support for gay marriage is now declining, reversing a yearslong trend. Earlier this month, Gallup released a poll showing that Republican support for gay marriage now stood at 37 percent, a decline of 18 percentage points from a high in 2022. Support among independents declined, too.
And a few Republican lawmakers are also pushing resolutions against gay marriage. . . . . Republican states have even started to rebrand Pride Month, the June commemoration of the Stonewall uprising and the signature moment for the gay liberation movement, calling it Fidelity Month or Nuclear Family Month.
Despite the arguments being made by Christian conservatives, and the findings of the Gallup polling, Gavin Smith, a gay Republican town councilman in Lexington, S.C., said he has not seen any evidence of rising opposition to gay couples among voters.
Like Mr. Smith, the husband and I have not experienced any hostility among yacht club and country club members we interact with and from Republican clients. Yet, the growing attacks from evangelicals and their political prostitutes within the GOP remain unnerving and can undermine one's sense of safety and security. Meanwhile and in direct contradiction to the movement within the GOP, as noted at the outset of this post, gay themed literature and films are seemingly surging and being embraced. One of David Beckham's sons is making his acting debut in a gay romance film and Amazon will be releasing a sequel to "Red White and Royal Blue" - one of Amazon's top streaming films - as filming prepares to start for season two of "Heated Rivalry" which seemingly has a cult following among straight women. A second piece in the New York Times looks at this surge in acceptance:
Just over 10 years ago, I opened a small bookstore a few hours northwest of New York City. The shelves are arranged by affinity: Notable people choose their 10 favorite books; elsewhere, titles gather around more whimsical themes. Early this year, I found myself creating a shelf I could not have imagined when I started: queer sports romances.
That’s where you now find “Heated Rivalry” beside “Thirty Love” and “Futbolista” — closeted hockey players, closeted tennis players, closeted college soccer players. The covers promise muscle, yearning and secrecy. Though the protagonists tend to be men, many of the genre’s writers and readers are women. At first, I saw these books as a playful little subgenre, a narrow tributary of romance publishing. Lately, I’ve come to see them as evidence of a much larger shift: Queer literature has become one of the growth engines of the publishing industry.
L.G.B.T.Q. fiction has never been more visible, more varied or better promoted. . . . It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published “Dancer From the Dance,” Larry Kramer published “Faggots” and Edmund White published “Nocturnes for the King of Naples.” That post-Stonewall flowering was followed by AIDS, which robbed queer literature of many of its writers and a substantial portion of its audience. Publishers retreated. To be labeled a gay or queer writer was a constraint.
The old assumption was that queerness should be downplayed to get a wider readership. In 2007, when Rakesh Satyal’s “Blue Boy,” a gay Indian American coming-of-age novel, was being shopped around, he thought its intersection of South Asian and queer experience might broaden its appeal. Publishers saw the opposite. “It was seen as a reduction of the audience,” he told me.
Today, the opposite looks true. Queerness sells. . . . . This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters.
According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published “A Little Life,” heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction had reached more than $80 million, a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled.
The very qualities that once made queer fiction seem too risky now make it useful. Queer books also come with organic systems of circulation: book clubs, queer bookstores, online fan communities and events that double as gatherings of friends. . . . For publishers, that is increasingly valuable. Queer books don’t simply find individual readers; they find communities.
The boom has created incentives for publishers to package gayness and for straight writers to borrow it. André Aciman, who is not gay, wrote one of the defining gay love stories of the past 20 years in “Call Me by Your Name.”
“I am writing outside my own experience to an extent,” he said, “but I’ve experienced desire, and I understand desire, and I can understand the desire between these two people on a human level. I hope that it felt true because it felt true when I was writing it, and I think that’s the important thing.”
One can only hope that the explosion of gay literature and movies/series will help usher in a renewed acceptance of LGBT people and demonstrate that our lives and loves are legitimate and have true value.
Friday, July 03, 2026
Like the Felon, Putin Is Slipping Into Delusion
When things get dicey in Moscow, Vladimir Putin tends to drop out of sight for a while, retreating to one of his residences and canceling public events. Only his closest aides know how he spends his time during these absences, which can go on for days even in the middle of a national crisis. The Kremlin does its best to fill the vacant airtime on state TV with pretaped footage of the president, waiting for him to reemerge and declare that everything remains under his control.
Since the end of last year, when Ukraine intensified its campaign of drone and missile strikes on Russian cities, Putin has taken a few of these breaks. Two of them lasted for more than a week. He has mostly avoided talking about the Ukrainian strikes, even as they caused fuel shortages across Russia, destroyed infrastructure, and shattered the sense of stability that Putin offers his people in exchange for their loyalty. His first detailed response to the threat came on Monday, and he did his best to seem unmoved.
In a carefully scripted interview on state TV, Putin looked bored with the details of governing Russia and managing the frustrations of his citizens, but he did not appear tired of his war in Ukraine. He spent most of the 19-minute conversation with a Russian news anchor dissecting the minutiae of the fighting . . . . The performance seemed designed to suggest that, away from the cameras, the Russian leader spends his time hunched over maps of the battlefield.
The Russian people, by contrast, have run out of patience with the war their leader seems so eager to continue. A survey released on the same day as Putin’s interview found that 81 percent of Russians want the war to end “as early as tomorrow.” The number of respondents who want the fighting to continue until Russia’s victory, no matter how long it takes, dropped in the survey to 9 percent, the lowest level ever recorded by the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia
Its most recent survey matched up with the images and complaints that have flooded Russian social networks in the past few weeks, showing long lines at gas stations in Moscow and trucks stalled without fuel on the roadside. “There’s no gasoline in the city,” one man posted from a suburb of Moscow. “And the TV is silent about it.”
If Putin cares about such problems, he has done a decent job of hiding it. “Everything is working stably and with a big reserve of strength,” he said in Monday’s interview, referring to the fuel shortages spreading through Russia.
M]ore than four years into his invasion of Ukraine, this element of Putin’s character seems only to have hardened. He treats the war as his calling, the purest expression of the power he has hoarded for a quarter century. The incalculable pain and suffering it has caused, with more than a million casualties overall, do not evoke for Putin anywhere near the level of emotion he displays when talking about the war’s mechanics. . . . . The Russian president’s obsession with the details of the fighting appears to have crossed the line into delusion.
Does that mania for war make him any more likely to cut his losses and accept a negotiated peace? Probably not. His interview on Monday illustrated what many in Ukraine and Europe have long concluded about Putin’s state of mind. He has convinced himself that the attritional math of the war favors Russia, and he will continue to press the numerical advantage of his forces regardless of how long the lines for gasoline in Moscow might get.
In the end, Russia could still face defeat, and the recent dynamics of the fighting have made that outcome look more likely than ever. Russia now loses an average of at least 30,000 troops a month, killed or gravely wounded. The Russian military struggles to replace those losses despite offering bonuses to new recruits worth up to $80,000—enough to buy an apartment in many Russian cities. For those sent to the front, the average life expectancy stands at around two or three weeks, according to one Russian military blogger who follows the fighting closely.
Mobilizing more troops would be among Putin’s more obvious options for continuing the war for a long time to come. In September 2022, during another low point for him in this war, Putin called up 300,000 soldiers in the first military draft in Russia since the Second World War. Doing that again would devastate the Russian economy and risk a surge of popular unrest. But many close observers of the war in Russia have concluded that Putin has no other choice. “This fall, there will either be peace or mobilization,” another military blogger wrote a few weeks ago, setting off a debate on Russian social networks about whether men should pack their bags for basic training.
In his interview, Putin did not mention any plans to mobilize more forces. He also didn’t point to any viable path to peace. He only repeated his aim to conquer all of Novorossiya, or New Russia, a vague term that, in his mind, seems to encompass most of southern and eastern Ukraine. At their current rate of advance, Russian forces would need several more years of fighting to stand a realistic chance of achieving that goal. They would also need to be prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But that appears to be Putin’s intent, regardless of how his people might feel about it.
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