Dealing with MAGA supporters & their empty demagoguery

The metaphor: We get empty, cynical demagoguery, slanders  

and drivel from authoritarian leaders 

in response to huge, real threats and problems

(the Martian heat ray machines)

In response, the crowd eats it up and blithers 

mindlessly back at the demagogues' empty rhetoric 

At BNR, hard core Trump and MAGA supporters routinely attack, insult and/or criticize me. A few minutes ago, I wrote out my view of the situation and posted it to one of my frequent insulters and critics. Their comments was that logic alone can't explain or deal with all of politics. That was a clever attack on my reliance on facts, robust truths and sound (less biased or good faith) reasoning. My response:

Logic alone might not be rationally convincing about all things all the time. But it damn well needs to be explained when it fails. And, when it fails, we are left with personal judgments and opinions. There is a leap from (1) pure facts to (2) true or robust truths (beliefs that most reasonably less biased/partisan people believe are true) to (3) personal judgments and opinions based on the facts and robust truths.

I find that ~99.9% of the time in political disagreements I engage in, the failure of my interlocutors to deal with simple facts and robust truths I assert reveal their weakness, irrationality, bad faith engagement, and/or blind, irrational partisanship of their arguments.

The most common responses I get from people who can't handle inconvenient facts or truths I raise are (a) insults (a form of logic flaw, and evidence of bad faith), (b) deflections (evidence of bad faith), (c) logic flaws (straw man arguments, false dilemma arguments, etc., also and evidence of bad faith), or (d) silence (more evidence of bad faith). I see those a-d responses all the time. I've been seeing it for over 20 years. That's how I know that when I ask someone to show the evidence or truth (1 and 2) they rely on for their opinions (3), they resort to one or more of a, b, c or d.

How often do my interlocutors come back at me with solid fact evidence? That happens in about 1 in every 300 to 400 disagreements I get entangled with.

I got facts and logic (roughly, often sound reason) on my side. Most MAGA people got just opinions on theirs. I believe that is usually why they refuse to engage with the facts and truths I assert in defense of my own judgments and opinions. They shoot opinion blanks, while I shoot fact and truth bullets.

Any thoughts, criticisms, feelings, etc.? Arrogant or condescending? Reasonable? Something else?

Thoughts about the complex problem of consciousness

For whatever reasons consciousness fascinates me but also always confuses me. That makes me frustrated. An expert commenting here suggested I read some Susan Blackmore. I got her 2017 2nd ed. book, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction[1] and came across what is the best clarifying, frustration-reducing explanation I've encountered so far. 

Blackmore wrote this about subjective feelings of pain, which are mediated by C-fibers in the body which send impulses to the spinal cord which sends impulses that wind up triggering neural activity in several parts of the brain:

"Which is the case with pain? Maybe the physical changes cause the pain in which case we have the hard problem. Maybe the pain causes the physical changes, in which case we need a supernatural theory. Maybe something else causes both, but we have no idea what. Or maybe they really are the same thing. Many materialists argue for this last explanation, but if this was true we have absolutely no idea of how it could be true. How could pain actually be the firing of my C-fibers?"

My translation into simpler language:

When we talk about pain, there are several possibilities.

The physical processes in the body such as nerve firing or brain activity cause the feeling of pain. But if that's the case, we face the "hard problem of consciousness", namely why and how those physical processes give rise to any subjective experience at all. The hard problem of consciousness is how to explain why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to any subjective experience. Why is there "something it is like" to feel pain, see red, or taste coffee? Even if we fully understand the brain's mechanisms and functions, the hard problem asks why those mechanisms are accompanied by conscious feeling rather than functioning in the dark with no subjective experience, like a zombie.

Alternatively, maybe the conscious feeling of pain causes physical changes in the body or brain. That view implies that subjective experience can independently influence the physical world. That requires a kind of non-physical or supernatural explanation, typically some form of "dualism" where the material brain is one thing and consciousness is different and immaterial.

A third possibility is that some unknown underlying factor causes both the physical changes and the subjective sensation. Currently we have no idea what such a factor might be. Also a form of dualism.

The fourth possibility as many materialist believers claim, is that the physical and the experiential or subjective feelings are not two different things at all. Instead, pain is identical to the firing of C-fibers and associated brain activity. But if that's true, we don't have a plausible explanation of how identity between a subjective feeling and a physical process could work or exist. We don't know how the qualitative sensation of hurting could literally be a pattern of nerve firings. As far as we think we know, we are not zombies.

Better understanding seems to be slowly dawning. Hope springs eternal. 

😊

Footnote:

1. This short book is in Oxford's Very Short Introduction series of books written by experts in their fields. The books are not high-level academia, but also not high school. They seem to be targeted at undergraduates in college or university. So far, there's about 820 of these excellent little books, with the list at this link.  

 

The home page

Part of the 1st page of the 

list of short intro books

I plan to get Moral Responsibility 

when it comes out in Nov. 2026 --

morality is another endlessly fascinating topic --

morality is at the heart of pragmatic rationalism,

my anti-ideology, anti-bias political ideology

Wearing down the defenders of the environment

Context

Most Americans don't know it but MAGA elite and bigoted, Christian nationalist theocrat Russell Vought is arguably the 2nd most powerful American today. He likes to fly under the radar. He once promised this to federal employees if Trump won the 2024 election: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work… We want their funding to be shut down… We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… We want to put them in trauma”. 

It isn't just federal employees that authoritarian MAGA ideology needs to break. America's authoritarian MAGA wealth and power movement needs to neutralize the same kinds of pro-democracy and pro-rule of law opposition that all corrupt tyranny movements need to subdue. A prime target for MAGA's transfer of wealth and power from the public interest to allied special interests is the environment and its defenders. 

Some recent reporting indicates that active environmentalists are wearing down and weakening. MAGA is winning its pro-pollution war. The defenders start from a position of weakness, unlike (1) the huge, powerful corporations like Exxon-Mobil that profit from pollution, and (2) intense government hater ideology that falsely argues that unregulated free markets will solve our problems, while government regulation can only make them worse. Wealth and power are, as usual, at the heart of this political and social war. 

The WD4C program (working dogs for 

conservation) provides support dogs to try to

reduce mental distress among conservationists

From eco-grief to eco-depression

The defender's weaknesses: One source reports that the environmentalism movement never considered the mental well-being of working conservationists. Those jobs are characterized by low wages, exploitative practices such as endless volunteering or unpaid internships, job insecurity, low benefits and high expectations for work that are sometimes unrealistic. Not surprisingly in view of the intense hostility that Trump and powerful MAGA elites hold for environmentalism (and democracy generally), mental problems among environmental workers are becoming more common. 

A 2023 research paper found that about 28% of conservationists were experiencing moderate to severe distress. The distress includes paranoia, panic attacks, depression, and suicide. Ecologic anxiety and climate distress foment adverse psychological and emotional responses to the dark future that climate change can lead to. 

Reasons for mental breakdown are obvious in the data. A World Wildlife Federation study found that global wildlife populations fell by 73% from 1970 to 2020. That is a staggering, shocking loss. Other research found that ~90% of global fisheries are either maxed out or overfished. Fisheries failure is one facet of ocean health decline. And there is the always denied, distorted or otherwise MAGA-spun reality that the world has heated up almost 1.5ᵒ C (2.7ᵒ F) in less than 200 years. The MAGA-denied impacts are pile up and there is no end in sight.

Being human, a growing belief among conservationists is that current evidence of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss is at a point where many activists no longer believe that we can recover anymore. Conservationists are feeling grief and loss very acutely not only because they directly experience it constantly. 

MAGA's intense hostility 

Conservationists are also aware of the ferocious hostility and hate of them and environmentalism that flows every day from Trump, MAGA elites and the pro-pollution sector of the US economy. For example, on Jan. 22, 2026 at a White House event, Trump mocked climate advocates as "environmental insurrectionists", accusing them of using bad weather to push a climate scam and job‑killing regulations. In Sept. of 2025, at Trump’s UN General Assembly address, he blamed radicalized environmentalists for trying to shut down factories and hurting the economy. MAGA makes it crystal clear where MAGA stands on the issue of environmentalism -- it is just a hoax.

Idaho Fish and Wildlife Office biologists hike at sunrise 

surveying greater sage-grouse in Owyhee County Idaho

People who aren't conservationists relate to the natural world and its beauty many different ways. A non-paywalled NYT opinion, The Badlands Hold Me as I Grieve, links one woman's grief with nature's beauty: "I have a kind of game I play with grief, imagining the birds I see are the people I’ve lost." She took this night picture of a hoot owl in her back yard in South Dakota:

 Personally, I mourn the avoidable loss of species and natural beauty that global warming caused. I see it here in the mountains in San Diego county. I feel some of the grief and mental distress. I know that Trump and MAGA are going to cause a lot more damage and continue to tell us it's just a hoax or something else ludicrous. Much of MAGA's damage will be either irreversible or very hard to reverse.  

Pardons for Sale: Trump’s Vision of Justice for the Right Kind of Criminals

Trump has turned his presidential pardon power into a sleazy, cash‑drenched patronage machine. This shows cynical indifference to law and harm done to ordinary people. His pardon of nursing‑home magnate Joseph Schwartz, who defrauded the government of nearly $39 million in payroll taxes and helped collapse a multistate nursing‑home chain, wiped out prison time, fines, and $5 million in restitution after Schwartz had served only a few months. This contempt for victims and for the sentencing judge, who had rejected leniency because of the scale of the fraud, signals a president who treats justice as an opportunity to harvest cash by selling access to his presidential pardon power. Link 1, link 2

Trump has built a lucrative “pardon industry” that now sells access and influence to rich felons. To buy a pardon, each criminal launders about $1 million to Trump through operatives and lobbyists with personal connections to the president and his inner circle. The official clemency list is a roll call of tax cheats, securities fraudsters, murderers, corrupt politicians, foreign influence peddlers, and January 6 and 2020‑election traitors. Trump rewards loyalty, ideological alignment, or personal usefulness in his calculation of who gets pardoned. He operates a pay‑to‑play get out of fines and jail (not for free) for criminals. Trump's moral rot openly mocks the rule‑of‑law ideal that justice cannot be bought. Link 3, link 4

Estimates are that Trump’s pardons and clemency grants have eliminated almost $2 billion in court‑ordered financial penalties, including restitution, fines, and forfeitures. Of that, more than $1.3 billion was owed directly to crime victims in restitution. In other words, Trump shafted the victims of pardoned criminals' crimes in return for payment from the criminals themselves. So far, his pardons have taken about $1.3 billion from innocent crime victims. Link 5, link 6

Criminals buying pardons for cash is MAGA law and order in action, right? /s

Q: Is Trump's pardons for cash evidence that he really is on the little guy's side, as he always claims, or is it evidence he is on the big guy's side and, more or less, could not care less about shafting little regular people who have been harmed by criminals?

Link to the DoJ's list of Trump pardons since Jan. 2025: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-donald-j-trump-2025-present