Update: MAGA’s ongoing war to enhance global warming

Starving polar bear -- not adapting well to 

MAGA's efforts to increase global warming

The effort by Trump and MAGA elites to obliterate public concern for global warming continues. New MAGA policies continue to expand the power and unaccountability of special interests that profit from polluting. As always with Trump and MAGA policy, profits, wealth, and power are privatized and trickled up to elites and allied corporations, while the public eats the costs, absorbs the harms, while its wealth and power melts away. By now, this pro-global warming effort has caused vast damage to America’s ability to adapt to global warming. Despite constant MAGA efforts to make the issue go away, majority public opinion is still concerned about global warming. For the most part, most of the public wants the basically the opposite of what Trump and MAGA elites are doing. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA elites don’t care enough about public opinion to stop doing what they are doing.

Helping the ice melt faster

An article, ‘Truly Devastating’: Trump Ends Federal Funding for Key Arctic Climate Report, exemplifies Trump’s effort to block research. The goal is hide and downplay data showing broad and deep impacts of global warming. Here, Trump just shuts down funding for important research that policymakers would need to help them deal with the issue. But as most reasonable people know by now, informed policymakers working for the public interest is absolutely not how MAGA governs.

Here, Trump stopped federal funding for an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that examined and reported on the state of the Arctic. That part of the planet is warming significantly faster than other regions as continued fossil fuel extraction and carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase global temperatures. For context, the last 10 years have been the 10 warmest on record for the Arctic. Trump stopping this research, which has been ongoing for over years, cripples our ability to track and assess Arctic region changes from year to year. Affected people and communities around the world are kept ignorant, as MAGA elites intend.

Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change

Deregulation by disempowering regulators

AP reporting in an article, Trump EPA moves to repeal landmark ‘endangerment finding’ that allows climate regulation, hits squarely on the core MAGA tactic of gutting federal regulatory agencies that often worked for the public interest. MAGA policy has been to subvert and corrupt federal agencies into entities that serve special interest wealth and power concerns. MAGA simply guts wealth and power serving the public interest and individuals. The public interest includes reasonably protecting the environment.

The proposed EPA rule rescinds a 2009 finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The “endangerment finding” is the legal basis of a slew of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. Trump’s and MAGA’s goal is to obliterate those regulations. That would allow and foster more pollution for profit for elites, with morse costs and damages socialized onto all of us.

MAGA’s cynical liar excuse is that environmental regulations were intended to regulate large sectors of the economy out of existence. Yes, regulations usually impose costs, but reasonable regulation is part of the cost of serving the public interest. We get the shaft while a few elites get our wealth and power. Trump and MAGA elites are deregulating the public interest out of existence.

Q: Based on evidence including that discussed or cited here, is Trump’s and MAGA elite’s efforts to (1) hide inconvenient environment research, and (2) get rid of environmental regulation, mostly beneficial for the public interest or for affected special interests?

Global warming, it’s partisan

Info sources:

Government Pulls Funding for the Arctic Report Card

A look at false claims made by the Trump administration as it revokes a key scientific finding

Trump Administration’s Unified Agenda Suggests Major Reversals on Climate Safeguards

EPA Repeals Legal Basis for Regulating Greenhouse Gases. What it Means for the US — and the World

Book review: Captive Minds

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.  

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, 1958

Nah, that's not for the first time. The few have always sought to rule the many. What's new is the reach, speed, and intimacy of manipulation machinery available to the elite few. 

Germaine, 2026

The May 2026 book, Captive Minds: A Study Of Manipulation, was written by two Israeli philosophers, Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon. Sharon is a professor  at Tel Aviv University, and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad, the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

A schizophrenic, academic read

This odd book is schizophrenic. It's boring to read too. It's too academic and often too attenuated from its core topic of mind manipulation. On the one hand its primary message truly could not be more important to politics and the human condition generally. The message is simple but subtle: To maintain democracy and fight off authoritarianism and deep corruption, citizens must be able to form and revise judgments without their reasoning processes being covertly distorted and hijacked by sophisticated mind manipulators. In short, mind manipulation is a powerful and common form of mental domination that damages cognitive freedom, which threatens democracy. 

But on the other hand, the philosophers fly off the rails by focusing on other philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc. They gloss over two major aspects of the modern world and knowledge  One is the book says little to nothing about Donald Trump, Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Those are among the modern world's most powerful and effective mind manipulators and cognitive freedom destroyers. That omission is striking for a 2026 book arguing that authoritarian mind manipulation is a central threat to democratic freedom.

The other blind spot is that the authors barely deal directly the modern situation. Captive Minds is conceptually serious and morally critically urgent, but its delivery is far too allusive, historically cluttered. The writing is too indirect for readers seeking a persuasive, science-grounded diagnosis of authoritarian mind manipulation in present-day democracies. The authors are the wrong messengers trying but failing to deliver a critically important message. This book provides a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary but leaves the reader to do the hard and complex, but essential work of connecting it to how organized contemporary authoritarians gain and maintain power. That work is just too darned hard. Most people cannot or will not do it. Total bummer. This book is for academicians and academically-minded lay people, not a general audience.

The core messages

According to the authors, mind manipulation is not simply lying, persuasion, rhetoric, or nudging. It is influence that exploits human mental vulnerabilities such as fear, vanity, resentment, desire for belonging, bigotry, racism, or intellectual shortcuts, to gain control over how that person reaches decisions. That is as a form of domination because it can impair personal freedom without overt force, legal compulsion, or even explicit deception. It often exerts power unconsciously. Many or most people never know that they have been manipulated.  

The authors posit that manipulation is the subtler counterpart of coercion (threats or brute force). They describe authoritarian manipulation like this: "Subversive power doesn't bully or punish. It doesn't break or crush you but instead harnesses your [intellectual] powers to its own aims. ..... 'Manipulation, unlike coercion, does not interfere with a person's options. Instead, it perverts the way that person reaches decisions, forms preferences, or adopts goals'. .... The essential point, we contend, is control over the will. ..... By viewing manipulation through the lens of power rather than truth or rationality, we highlight the centrality of control and the affinity [relationship] with coercion. ..... both coercion and manipulation are forms of domination."

You can see the academic-speak in that.

Fundamentally, mind manipulators pervert the process of judgment in other people. They influence what people think they see, whom they trust, what emotions frame an issue, and what alternatives are mentally accessible and seemingly reasonable. The authors point out that demagogues, propagandists, and conspiracy entrepreneurs create cognitive mind traps that corrode civic and rational deliberation. Public manipulation often works through agenda control and attention capture to push aside in order to crowd out truth-seeking, rational reasoning, open-mindedness and good will.

In short, the book's main weakness is its failure to translate authoritarian mind manipulation insights into a sufficiently concrete analysis of the institutions and actors now destroying democracies worldwide and precisely how they are doing it.

Teaching children defenses against the dark arts

Russian occupied Finnish territory

Context

In modern times, one of the greatest threats to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, truth, the environment, human well-being, and modern civilization is the dark arts. That includes divisive demagoguery, propaganda, lies, slanders, bigotry, racism, crackpot reasoning (often nutty conspiracy theories), and irrational emotional manipulation to foment reason killing emotions such as unwarranted fear, anger, hate, distrust and moral outrage. Decades of radical right American demagoguery, have successfully led tens of millions of Americans to believe all kinds of lies, slanders, fake threats, crackpot conspiracy theories, etc.

Three things stand about about the dark arts in recent US history. First, it is constitutionally protected free speech. Second, the irrational deceit, distrust, divisiveness and bigotry it fomented was necessary for the rise of American MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy to gain major power and mostly keep at least since Jan. 2017. That’s when Trump was first sworn into office. Third, most of this is not new. Tyrants, thieves, liars, demagogues and mass murderers have been heavily reliant on the dark arts for millennia. Plato and Aristotle recognized the toxic power of demagoguery. What’s new now is technology that dark arts practitioners now have to bamboozle and manipulate people with their cynical lies, hate-filled bigotry, etc.

Teaching dark arts defenses to citizens

A NYT article, Finland Tries to Protect Children Against Deepfakes, With Russia in Mind, discusses current efforts in Finland to fight off the onslaught of powerful Russian dark arts attacks that are now more deadly due to the rise of AI. For years, the government in Finland has been sophisticated and dedicated about trying to protect its people against Russian propaganda attacks. Now those attacks include AI-generated content that take the Russian authoritarian’s propaganda war to a new level of sophistication and aggression.

In it’s self-defense efforts, Finland is expanding its long‑running media‑literacy work to include “AI literacy”. That includes teaching students from early grades how to recognize and evaluate AI‑generated images, audio and video so they’re less vulnerable to deceit and manipulation by AI deepfakes. Researchers and defense efforts in Finland are developing technical countermeasures such as speech/deepfake detection and source‑tracing, but detecting increasingly realistic synthetic audio and video is getting technically harder. AI in the hands of professional propagandists is learning to do better at deceiving and manipulating people.

Journalists and investigators have found nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of Finnish public figures and celebrities circulating online. That increased public concern and pressure for stronger protections. Finland’s education‑first approach builds attack resilience but that will need to be combined with better technical detection, more legal protections (especially for nonconsensual sexual content), and platform‑level measures to manage rising deepfake risks. 

In the US few or none of those measures is possible with MAGA in power. Any US effort to censor lies, or at least flag them, is immediately attacked by MAGA and MAGA-aligned demagogues and liars as socialist tyranny censoring “truth”. American social media platforms have been cowed into getting rid of meaningful content moderation, so for honest news social media tends to be cesspits of lies and other dark arts poisons. That is a major source of MAGA authoritarian and kleptocratic power.

Q1: Given the increasing power of dark arts to deceive and manipulate people, it is time to get rid of anonymity on the internet, which would go a long way to reduce dark art’s destructive, mind poisoning power?

Q2: Is Finland simply imposing socialist tyranny by censoring “truth”, as MAGA demagogues would describe it?

Info sources:

After decades of teaching media literacy, Finland equips students with skills to spot AI deepfakes — As deepfakes proliferate online, Finland adds AI literacy to its school curriculum to help children as young as 3 to recognize AI-generated fake news.

Speech deepfakes continue to challenge researchers – …. deepfake research is like playing cat and mouse. Recent years have seen significant advances in the accuracy of detection methods and countermeasures, but model generalization remains a major challenge.

Explicit Finnish celebrity deepfakes hiding in plain sight, Yle finds – Yle anonymously contacted the website’s contributing users who post images there. They replied using pseudonyms and their identities are not known. ….. The people that posted the deepfakes who spoke with Yle said that it is becoming easier to generate the images. One user admitted making nearly 200 images in a single day.

Trump's & MAGA's war on US history

Executive Order 14253

Restoring lies and insanity to US history

Just like what Putin and his predecessors did to Russian and Soviet Union history, Trump is aggressively obliterating inconvenient American history. It's just what morally degenerated, lying tyrants do. A NYT opinion by Russian journalist Masha Gessen, Trump Is Trying to Force Americans to Unlearn What We Know, covers familiar ground. She's seen and reported before on this tyrant tactic.

Gessen points out that in Soviet Union times, some folks liked to say “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.” That's because Russians never knew which part of their history would be obliterated next. The same thing is happening right now in the US under Trump and MAGA politics and policy. Trump and MAGA elites are trying to make American history unpredictable. 

To kick off his rewrite of history, Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which (1) orders officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, (2) cuts funding to “programs that degrade shared American values”, and (3) reinstates some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Since Trump issued that order, the National Park Service removed signs about slavery, the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; and a scathing White House report accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.” Trump recently issued another executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”

Gessen notes that large amounts of information about Soviet terror came to light after the Soviet Unions collapsed. However, Putin forced that knowledge into oblivion. What Trump is getting rid of is the history and legacy of American slavery and racism. 

Yes, former and current political initiatives to reframe American history are heavily propelled by conservative culture warriors and key figures aligned with Christian nationalist frameworks. These groups promote hyper-nationalist narratives that deny or minimize major inconveniences like slavery while championing white civic mythology. MAGA-aligned racists and bigots are key drivers of whitewashing US history. Link