MAGA's Hot Dog Men

A Vox article, The MAGA stars freaked out by their own movement -- The right’s leading lights are looking for anyone to blame for the right’s growing extremism — except themselves, discusses an interesting observation about some of the MAGA elites who question or occasionally criticize Trump. Despite their vast cluelessness and utterly closed minds, a few elites (former elites actually, they're now in the MAGA doghouse) are experiencing a flicker of recognition that briefly flashes through their minds. Vox quotes this from US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) in 2017:

“They weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.” 

Well, that's all well and good, but Massie nonetheless supported Trump for the most part. However despite his support, the “craziest son of a bitch” took Massie down in the last primary in Kentucky. Trump was in a snit because of Massie’s stance on the Epstein files and the Iran war. Trump endorsed Massie’s challenger in KY, and the libertarian got blown right out of his seat in congress.

The Vox article points out that at no point, during or after the race did Massie publicly leap** to the logical next step of reflecting on how his own stupid, morally rotted actions contribute to the “craziest son of a bitch” problem. Massie’s years of vocal support for Trump, and his anti-democracy Tea Party politics, helped turn the GOP into the authoritarian political chaos agent he once criticized and whined about. What an effing blind idiot.

** Well, not much of a leap really. Actually no leap at all. However, a gigantic ego helps keep Massy's mind free of inconvenient reasoning like “Geez Louise, I supported the craziest son of a bitch, but is it possible I could bear some responsibility for my own mistakes? Nah, not possible. Joe Biden and Hunter's laptop did it, not me.”. 

Vox summarizes it like nicely this:

Massie is the poster child for a particular kind of conservative now emerging in Trump’s second term: influential Trump allies who have sounded the alarm about the right’s direction, but who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their own actions in the Trump era may have had something to do with it.

The hot dog thing

Vox points out that this phenomenon is somewhat like a real-life version of the famous sketch on Tim Robinson’s show I Think You Should Leave. There, a hot-dog-shaped car crashes into a storefront and a man in a hot dog suit says, “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” The “hot dog men” are almost all men are easy to spot. Their painfully slowly growing ranks says something serious. Namely, America's authoritarian radical right-wing political machine is acting in ways that even some of its most aggressive and radical voices are slowly coming to recognize as dangerous or worse. None of the radical authoritarians in the GOP shows any ability to contain or redirect the most tyrannical, most corrupt forces they unleashed.

The core argument Vox is making is pretty simple. A few of the radical right elites have come to a point where MAGA's continuing radicalization has begun to spin out of their control. Those elites thought they were steering the ship, but their ship is the Titanic and they don't know how to steer. Of course, admitting one's error is tough to impossible. admitting culpability for something bad happening is even harder. 

In politics, all movements have had “hot dog men” moments of desperately blaming anyone but themselves for their mistakes. At present, a growing number of hot dog men in the right’s top ranks are still in blame-shifting mode. But, bad as it is, that's significant an improvement over still being in the three monkeys mode where a few, maybe 2% of MAGA elites are firmly nested. They're very busy feathering their nests, while either ignoring evil or supporting it.

The few clueless MAGA elites

Most MAGA elites know exactly 

who and what they stand for, i.e., 

themselves, corruption, tyranny & cruelty

MAGA’s grievous attack on American science

 CONTEXT

Enough time has passed for reasonable assessments of the astounding damage that Trump and MAGA elites have caused and will continue to cause. All major aspects of American society, government, law, science, education, commerce and religion are under relentless attack by authoritarian MAGA extremism.

Trump and MAGA elites make America great again for themselves by destroying what it was and turning it into their plaything for their pleasure and wealth. The elites Trump chooses to run his ghastly horror show are a cadre of absolute loyalists. For the most part, the elites are a group consisting of opportunistic, self-serving authoritarian liars, cranks, crackpots, grifters, theocratic Christian zealots and sex perverts. Yes, that includes grifters and sex perverts. Destroying American science means nothing to them. Link, link, link, link, link, link

Clueless about science, and doesn’t care

The MAGA attack on American science

A NYT opinion, (not paywalled) lays out just some of the vast damage done to science and future research. The op-ed by Jeff Coller, an RNA biologist at Johns Hopkins, uses the origin story of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy as a parable about the irreplaceable value of basic, curiosity-driven science. The central claim is that the Trump administration’s proposed rule requiring all federal research grants to be approved by political appointees and to “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities” would have made drugs like Ozempic impossible to develop.

Coller’s points out that the OMB’s, run by hyper-radical Christian nationalist theocrat Russell Vought, proposed 412-page Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, published May 29, 2026. Vought’s anti-science rule subordinates peer review to review by political loyalists. Federal research grants now must to align with presidential priorities or they will not be funded. What are the president’s priorities? No one know, including the president. He is clueless about science and doesn’t care about it.

Under Vought’s proposal, the long-standing gold standard of peer review at NIH and NSF gets reduced to a vague “advisory” function with no decision-making power. The OMB is accepting public comments through July 13, 2026. This comes on top of already steep damage: the Trump administration froze or canceled billions in research grants in 2025, courts ordered much of the money released, yet agencies have still funded fewer grants monthly compared to prior years. The White House’s proposed FY2026 budget would cut NSF funding by 56.9% and NIH by 39.3%.

Coller points out accumulating harms. Graduate programs at top research universities reduced fall admissions. That will deplete the next generation of scientists. A cancer researcher Rachel Sirianni told NPR that her promising pediatric brain tumor drug combination had virtually no chance of getting funded today. A report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation warned that the current trajectory of science funding cuts could cost the US nearly $1 trillion in economic output over the next decade. Separately, researchers at institutions like the Broad Institute report lab funding cut by one-third to two-thirds, forcing painful choices about which personnel and projects to keep.

MAGA is at war against science in the public interest. Now, whatever is left will be science in the interest of Trump and allied elites. What that will be is unknown to us. Some of the elites probably have an idea of how to piss away our money for their own wealth and power, including serving their extremist ideologies such as laissez-faire capitalism, and bigoted fundamentalist Old Testament Christian theocracy.

Regardless of cynical propaganda that Trump or MAGA elites use to hide what they are doing, e.g., improving efficiency, the evidence is solid that no one can pick the winners of basic research in advance. Science progress is unpredictable and driven by factors such as curiosity. It is not driven by corrupt, crackpot politics. Making science research funding subject to political whim by arrogant, corrupt science ignoramuses, has nothing to do with improving efficiency. That is an anti-efficiency policy. Simply put, MAGA is ending American science in service to the public interest and that is a fact, not an opinion. Link, link

Book review: The War On Illahee

"Survivors of the Cayuse Indian War" 

Pacific Northwest pioneers with their decorations, June 1902

 Historian Marc James Carpenter’s 2025 book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest, focuses primarily on pioneer conflicts with various native Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest in the 1840s through the 1850s. The height of the conflict was in 1855-1856. Violence continued sporadically into the 1860s. So far, scholarly analysis of Carpenter’s book seems to be positive. Historians of the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous history, and settler colonialism generally see this book as empirically solid and historically significant. The C-Span series American History TV broadcast an hour lecture by Carpenter talking about his book. Link

A 2020 article Carpenter wrote for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, V. 121(2), pp. 156-185, Pioneer Problems: “Wanton Murder”, Indian War Veterans, and Oregon’s Violent History, gives a nice overview of the whole picture his research is focused on.

In Illahee, Carpenter has meticulously documented (85 pages of detailed footnotes) a horror story of indescribable savagery and sadness. This book is almost as ghastly as Conrad’s fictional tale (based on real events) of human brutality in his 1899 book, Heart of Darkness, about Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State.

Carpenter spent years researching for this book. To some extent this book challenges some of current spun history about the conflicts. Carpenter found a significant source of about untold events and new information about distorted events in pioneer sources who disagreed among themselves about how to spin what they had done. They wanted to portray murdering white pioneers as heroic innocent people struggling to survive in the face of implacable hostility from native American Indians.

About Illahee, the homeland

Carpenter intentionally tells the history of conflict and death as a widespread war composed of many small to moderate sized conflicts, some of which were given individual names that describe single conflict events as a “war”. Illahee does not refer to any Indian tribe or polity. It is a term that was generally understood among most white pioneers and Northwest Indian tribes to mean “homeland”. Indian tribes and white pioneers believed they were fighting for their rightful homelands. The Indians believed that they owned the land because they had always lived there. By contrast, the pioneers believed it was their land due to either God’s divine will, or because white domination and Indian elimination was inevitable. The dominant pioneer belief was that the Indians were entitled to nothing, including their physical existence. They were subhuman, and therefore owned no land and had no inviolate rights whatsoever.

The few whites who wanted to coexist peacefully with the Indians were seen at best as complicit with Indians, but more likely seen as traitors against the US. Despite their hostility toward co-existence believers, the pioneers in power stopped just short of imprisoning or killing them. But that is what they wanted to do.

Indian treaties: An illusion

Carpenter is blunt that Indian treaties were a shame right from the get go. The dominant pioneer intent was to use treaties to incrementally exterminate all Indians and take their land. In 1884, a former gold miner and soldier, Francis Henry, then a judge, told a gathering of pioneers that the Pacific Northwest Indian wars were:

“but the inevitable continuation of the old story of the colonization and occupation of America by the whites, which has been enacted times without number from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, during the last four hundred years. [It was] simply one of the three incidents of that inevitable destiny which has already subjected the whole continent to the use of civilized man, namely: First, the insidious invasion of the pioneer; second, a treaty by the government with the Indians; and third, their forcible expulsion from that territory to convenient reservations, to be taken from them by the same process at some future time.”

Worse than that, the idea that there was “treaty by the government” is an exaggeration. Local thugs, officials and US military went off on their own, slaughtered or captured Indians and then “negotiated” a treaty that the US government never ratified. Treaty negotiations were routinely fortified by the persuasive tactic of threatening the surviving Indians with total annihilation if they did not agree to whatever terms white people imposed. Death threats were routine, explicit and blunt.

White pioneer war tactics

As one might expect, white brutality was ghastly. Captured Indians were sometimes murdered, with the excuse they were trying to escape. Many or most of those killings were just in cold blood with no reason. When Indians retaliated or tried to defend themselves from unprovoked attack, whites routinely spun that as innocent white people being viciously attacked for no reason. That was fairly common. It was used to justify horrific slaughter of Indians by pioneers.

In their attacks on Indians, pioneers almost never checked to see if the people they were attacking and killing were among those alleged to have attacked or threatened pioneers. The pioneers saw all Indians as a one undifferentiated group. There was routine killings of members of a tribe with no connections to any pioneer threat or conflict. All the Indians looked alike and they were treated alike. “Wrong place, wrong time” turned out to be a lethal reality for a lot of murdered Indians.

In 1855, volunteer pioneer militias in Oregon rampaged aimlessly across the land, attacking nearly all groups of Indian they happened to come across. Although they were largely incompetent in their war effort, they still posed an existential threat to Indian communities. On Dec. 5, 1855, Walla Walla Indian leader and diplomat Yellow Bird (Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox) carrying a truce flag approached pioneers to negotiate a treaty. He was hoping to save what was left of his people from annihilation. The pioneers ignored the truce signal and captured him and killed his treaty party. That touched off running battles. That led the pioneers to murder Yellow Bird, scalp him and cut is body into pieces for trophies. The murder was excused because his killers claimed he was trying to escape. Official accounts from the nominal commander, James Kelly, simply ignored the fact that Yellow Bird came in peace trying to negotiate a treaty.

Yellow Bird (Pew pew mas mas [sic])

Conclusion

Carpenter’s book goes on and on like this for 284 pages. Trigger warning: This book is not for the faint of heart.

A final point. Some of the pioneer leaders of the carnage went on to be state governors, US Senators and other ranking officials. The histories of Oregon and Washington are loaded with people who were, by modern standards, war criminals, virulent racists or both. Some were stone cold killers who won their influence purely on the basis of their savagery. The history they told is very different from the history Carpenter tells. Who is a person to believe?

The Unfinished Review (Short Story)

A short story — a departure from the usual fare. This one describes a future secular religion built around a dead author, discovered through the last document in its canon: an unfinished review.

 

The Unfinished Review

---

Editorial Preface

(from The Friendian Reader, 2154 edition)

The essay that closes this volume has attained a curious sanctity. Commissioned in 2078 as a mere review of a new biography of Kim Adversary, it somehow became the last substantial document in the entire tradition. Its author, known only as "the Reviewer" in the literature, produced what many still regard as the clearest-eyed survey of the Jacob Friend phenomenon — before stopping, mid-sentence, never to return to the subject.

Subsequent scholarship has, inevitably, produced competing interpretations of that cutoff. The Metaphysicals read it as a moment of kenosis. The Textualists call it a printer's error. Certain Silentist communities maintain, with serene confidence, that the Reviewer spent the summer of 2079 living incognito among them, baiting hooks and refusing to discuss literature after dinner. He has never confirmed nor denied the claim. In keeping with the spirit of the piece itself, we present it here unfinished, exactly as it first appeared.

---

The Unfinished Review

by Anonymous (published in The New Atlantic Review, 2078)

Any honest account of the Jacob Friend phenomenon must begin with an admission: it is ridiculous. A talented writer of surreal short stories dies at thirty. He leaves behind instructions that turn his own funeral into the world's most highbrow parlor game. Grieving friends — published authors, members of his monthly workshop called The Rites — are asked to bring their best unfinished manuscripts and rewrite them with the corpse inserted as protagonist. "See what shakes out of the fiction and falls into the real world," Jacob had always said. They took him at his word.

One friend arrived with a hard-boiled detective story and left with Jacob as a brooding, chain-smoking private eye who solves murders by dreaming them. Another produced a forty-page prose poem in which Jacob appears as a sentient fog that subtly ruins marriages. A third turned in a time-travel romance where the dead author keeps trying to warn his younger self not to die so inconveniently. The mourners read these new versions aloud in the funeral home while sipping terrible coffee. Some laughed through tears. Others felt quietly manipulated. All of them were already playing the game.

Then the diary surfaced.

If the funeral instructions had the light touch of a thought experiment, the diary was something sharper. Jacob had spent his final weeks ranking his friends with the serene confidence of a man who would not be around to defend his judgments. The entries have an unnerving quality — intimate, precise, probabilistic. "I know Sal won't believe any of this," he writes in one passage. "Jane will. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when that particular collision happens." Reading it, one has the sensation of watching a chess master annotate a game that hasn't been played yet. The board is real. The players are real. Only the master is gone.

Kim was singled out repeatedly as the wisest, the one who "understands best," and — crucially — the one most likely to resist the whole enterprise. The trap was elegant. By predicting the resistance, Jacob turned it into prophecy. Kim, reading this, must have felt the specific helplessness of someone who sees the mechanism perfectly and cannot stop it anyway, because seeing it is part of the mechanism.

I confess more than a passing sympathy for Kim. I have read his four major exegeses with something that occasionally felt uncomfortably close to recognition — the quality of argument of a man who knows he is right and cannot make it matter, who writes another hundred pages because stopping would feel like surrender, who somewhere along the way stopped trying to close the book and started needing to be the one who closed it. His early work — Against Prophecy, The Manufactured Messiah — has the clean fury of genuine moral clarity. His later volumes have a different texture: rooms with closed windows. The argument is still correct. The correctness no longer seems to be the point.

For decades Kim fought back with the only weapons he had: biography after biography, exegesis after exegesis, furious lectures insisting that the books should be closed and ordinary grief allowed to proceed. Each new volume became scripture. Each denunciation of guruship was greeted with murmurs of "How wise… just like the old masters said." There is a recorded exchange — preserved, with relish, in the Collected Testimonies — in which a young disciple quotes Kim's own words back at him as proof of his enlightenment, while Kim sits across the table visibly deciding whether to flip it. He did not flip it. He published another book instead. The man spent half a century trying to kill a religion and became one of its minor saints. The Kimites still quote his outburst at the funeral — "Do you want to be ghostwritten? Close the book. Live your real lives." — with the same reverence Catholics reserve for the Sermon on the Mount. The irony is so complete it feels almost tender.

The factions that followed were as predictable as they were human. The Metaphysicals wanted a prophet who could soothe the ache of existence and found one in the fog, the detective, and the diary combined. The Purists wanted a sophisticated secular faith built around imagination and meaning, and policed its boundaries with impressive ferocity in cafés that smelled of absinthe and disappointment. The Textualists just wanted to keep writing decent stories and grew increasingly annoyed that no one would let them.

And then there were the Silent. They are harder to write about than the others, and I notice I have been putting them off. They did what Kim preached and what he could not do: they put the books down, tended gardens, argued about sports, and grieved a flawed friend instead of a savior. They left no record, which is why the exegetes have spent seventy years trying to determine who they were and what they believed. The answer is probably that they believed ordinary things, and that this is not a satisfying answer, and that their silence knew it wouldn't be. There is something in the quality of their absence that resists the ironic register. I will not pretend otherwise.

One begins to feel the gravitational pull even while describing it all. Jacob was a manipulative genius; or Jacob was a playful innocent whose friends over-interpreted him; or the whole thing reveals something profound about—

[Here the manuscript ends.]

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Editor's Note

(2154)

In the decades after publication, the Reviewer politely declined hundreds of requests to complete the essay, explain the cutoff, or offer further commentary on the Friendian traditions. He continued writing regularly — film criticism, cultural essays, the occasional short piece on gardening — until his death in 2091. Neighbors described him as sociable, mildly ironic, and fond of long walks. He was seen dating, attending local film festivals, and fishing the northern rivers. When asked about the famous unfinished review, he is reported to have shrugged and said, "Nobody controls how these things land."

Certain Silentist communities still insist he spent the summer of 2079 with them. They describe a man who baited hooks competently, listened more than he spoke, and once laughed out loud when someone tried to draw him into theological discussion. Whether true or not, the story has become part of the tradition. Like so much else in this history, it refuses to stay merely factual.