Trump continues to obliterate public interest science research

Polluting for profit is profitable

As we all know by now, MAGA politics hates climate science research, and climate laws and regulations. As part of their anti-public interest holy war, Trump and MAGA elites have almost completely destroyed the EPA and other pro-public interest federal research programs.

A few weeks ago, Trump proposed a 52% budget cut for the EPA’s climate and public health research. He cynically smeared EPA research as “Green New Scam spending”. a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats. In just 15 months, Trump has almost completely dismantled EPA research. About 1,500 biologists, chemists and other experts at the EPA’s Office of Research and Development have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Only 124 researchers remain, and those are under pressure to go away. 

Experts point out that Trump’s wrecking ball to dismantle EPA research seriously weakens the government’s ability to protect public health. But that is the point. So for Trump, MAGA elites and businesses that pollute for profit, the death of EPA research is a huge MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!! moment. For the public interest and public health, it’s a huge kick in the pants.

In other dismal anti-public interest science news, Trump's FY2027 budget proposes 54% cuts to NSF, 47% to NASA Science, 28% to NIST, 13% to DOE Office of Science, 10% to NIH, and eliminating NOAA research funding. In essence, MAGA extremism isn obliterating all federal research. The damage to America’s science infrastructure is catastrophic. Assuming the federal government ever returns to pro-science policy, the damage will take years to repair, assuming American science can be returned to something at least fairly close to MAGA’s anti-science mindset. Link, link, link 

On top of budget cuts and getting rid of experts, Trump and MAGA elites have shut down enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. The goal is to free violators to expand pollution without much or any concern for public health. For example in Jan. 2025, Trump froze all existing environmental litigation and settlement negotiations. He reassigned senior Dept. of Justice environmental enforcement chiefs to immigration work, gutting the federal enforcement effort. Last March, he also sent EPA enforcement employees memo (1) requiring political appointee (Trump sycophants) approval for cases against major polluters, and (2) completely barring enforcement actions from interfering with any phase of energy production. Link, link

In addition, Trump's April 2025 executive order directed the US Attorney General to take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement of state climate laws, specifically targeting California, New York, and Vermont cap-and-trade programs, carbon taxes, and lawsuits against oil companies. Trump also eliminated supplemental environmental projects from pollution settlements, barring EPA from including cleanup projects in agreements with polluters. DOJ terminated environmental justice investigations and settlement agreements in April 2025. An April 2025 executive order directed EPA to revise environmental regulations to automatically terminate by October 2026. Link, link, link

Big oil 💓 Trump!

Public opinion 

Gallup's March 2-18, 2026 Environment poll found Americans’ environmental assessments at their bleakest levels: only 35% rated environmental quality as excellent or good (a record low), while a near-record high 66% said the environment’s quality is worsening. A record-low 63% believe the government is not doing enough to protect the environment. Despite Trump's rollbacks, majorities prioritize environmental quality over economic growth (58%) and energy development (57%). Over 60% of voters believe clean energy development should be a high or very high priority for the President and Congress. Finally, a December 2025 poll indicated that 66% of registered voters favor transitioning the US economy completely from fossil fuels to clean energy by 2050. Link, link, link

MAGA's continuing corruption of American science

By now it is clear that Trump and MAGA policy and tactics has targeted American science for corruption into a taxpayer-paid service center for special interests. Science reports that on April 24, Trump fired all 24 members of the US National Science Foundation’s governing body. That will get rid of its independence and focus on science in the public interest. The tax dollars the NSF controls will be reoriented to serve special interests who pay in Trump's deeply corrupted pay-to-play administration.

Trump's email from his personnel office insultingly dumped them like this: “On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

Those firings removed the institutional safeguard designed to insulate taxpayer-funded scientific research decisions from political interference and special interest capture. Now, all any special interest has to do to get access to those tax dollars is pay Trump what he demands. Miraculously, taxpayer science will start working for special interests to solve special interest problems, not to solve public interest problems. 

For context, the NSF funds ~25% of all federally supported basic research in the US. It has a nearly $9 billion annual budget. 

NSF board members have been critical of Trump’s proposed massive NSF budget cuts, including a proposed 55% reduction. So, Trump got his revenge on both those feisty board members and taxpayer dollars spend in service to the public interest. The mass firings here follow a well-established pattern of executive orders that codify denying or terminating grants not aligned with what Trump and allied special interests want. What they want is to stop research on inconvenient (profit-impairing) things like climate change and mRNA vaccines. 

The concern that tax dollars will be reoriented to serve special interests who pay in Trump's deeply corrupted pay-to-play administration reflects the fundamental incompatibility between merit-based peer review and corrupt, politically directed funding.

Once again, the taxpayer is screwed, while allied pay-to-play special interests can reap big rewards on the taxpayer dime, in return for their "free speech" in the form of bribery of Trump and his elite MAGA allies.

Trump's killers

A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by the editorial board, Measles Is Back. What Comes Next Will Be Worse, focuses on the resurgence of diseases that children are no longer being vaccinated for. Trump's policy as implemented by anti-vaxxer and medicine crackpot Robert Kennedy Jr. is now starting to be felt in the form of children getting infected and dying because they are not vaccinated.

So far this year, 1,700 cases of measles have been reported in the US. There were about 70 per year in the early 2000s. Three children died in 2025. Also surging is cases of  cases of whooping cough in unvaccinated children. Also apparently increasing is meningitis (caused by the Haemophilus influenzae type b bacteria) that killed two unvaccinated Florida children. 

Child with bacterial meningitis

So, preventable deaths that Trump/Kennedy rhetoric and policy have caused are now happening in real time. The MAGA-hyper-stupified state of Florida is trying to get rid of some childhood vaccines, leading parents to distrust vaccines and refuse to get their kids vaccinated.  

One medical doctor comments that under the idiot/killer Kennedy, the CDC intentionally underestimates the current incidence of bacterial meningitis and other diseases in the US because the idiot, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, cut CDC surveillance and reporting of vaccine-preventable diseases. So, MAGA policy is to get rid of effective vaccines and hide the inevitable deaths and disease injuries from us.

Q: Are Trump and Kennedy guilty of murder or manslaughter, or innocent by reason of MAGA-stupification, gross incompetence, malicious, sadistic cruelty, or something else?

Thoughts about regulating lies and dishonest free speech

Cass Sunstein’s 2021 book, Liars: Falsehoods And Free Speech In An Age of Deception, is focused on existing limits on free speech in the US, and the pros and cons of further regulations on free speech. Sunstein is a Harvard law school professor and legal scholar. The book is short (133 pages), non-technical and easy to read. Sunstein’s assessment of America’s situation, analysis and reasoning leads him to propose this:

False statements are not constitutionally protected if the government can [objectively] show that they threaten to cause serious harm that cannot be avoided through a more speech-protective route.

Since Sunstein’s book published in 2021, the damage and intensity of dishonest or dark free speech in politics, e.g., demagoguery, lies, defamation, divisive crackpot reasoning, irrational emotional manipulation, etc., have significantly worsened under Trump and MAGA politics, tactics and policy. Most safeguards and norms that tended to limit dark free speech harms have weakened or fallen completely. The damage to society, American democracy, government and commerce is vast. It is mostly hidden by demagoguery, distractions, defections and lies that soften and normalize free speech harms. Much of the damage will not be reversible any time soon, if ever.

At present, laws regulate several kinds of dark free speech. The main ones are false advertising or fraud, defamation (written libel or spoken slander), perjury under oath in court proceedings, non-trivial false statements to government officials, child porn, incitement of imminent lawless action, “true threats” of unlawful violence, copyrights, and trade secrets. In the case, United States v. Alvarez, the USSC rejected broad bans on “mere lies” when they don’t amount to harms like fraud, perjury, or defamation (significant harm to reputation).

Thus in politics, most dark free speech in the form of demagoguery, lies, crackpot conspiracy theories and irrational emotional manipulation (bigotry, racism, etc.) are constitutionally protected and the government cannot regulate it. But the 1st Amendment right to free speech does not apply to private entities, e.g., blogs like BNR, newspapers, social media or broadcast media. Private entities can regulate what protected speech they allow and disallow.

The pros and cons of speech regulation

Sunstein points out the complexity. He points out that the chances of truth surviving in the face of hostile power are very low. Lies and deceit can always push truth out of the world. Facts are very fragile things, easy to distort and destroy.

He carefully distinguishes between falsehoods based on honest mistakes, intentional lies, and bullshit, i.e., content based on no concern for truth or harm. Honest mistakes are human and unavoidable. But so are lies and BS. The level of harm that falsehoods cause varies from grave and literally lethal to nonexistent. The probability and timing of potential harm varies from (i) certain to highly improbable, and (ii) immediate to distant future. Those factors are relevant to considering regulation of lies. He does not propose regulating honest mistakes because an intent to deceive is absent.

Sunstein points out that liars often believe that their lies are morally justified. In their minds, the ends they believe in lying for justifies their intentional deceit and the risks of harm to innocents their deceit might cause. For example, belief in lies about vaccines can and has caused people to reject them. That has led to the deaths or serious harm of some of them or others they infect. 

Sunstein also points out that lying and falsehoods violates people’s power and autonomy. The reasoning is simple. When people have been deceived, and they think and act of the basis of deceit, deceit has taken from them their power to think and act on the basis of truth. In other words, power flows from the deceived to the deceivers. Deceit is thus inherently authoritarian, corrupt or usually both. So are the deceivers.

The obvious problem inherent in regulating dark free speech, bias and abuse of power, is inherent in the human condition. The natural human urge is to use power to ward off criticism and embarrassing truths. Authoritarians are heavily biased to abuse their power to insulate themselves from criticism and embarrassing truths. Trump is a current example. He attacks and sues the mainstream media and political opponents, but has no basis in law to do so. If there were laws regulating dark free speech, morally rotted authoritarians like Trump would falsely claim that inconvenient truth from his targets are lies and subject to being shut down by the law. That has already happened. Link, link, link

Finally, Sunstein points out that the default human condition is to trust what they hear. That can flip to distrust if the listener is informed of relevant facts or has reason to distrust a known dishonest source, e.g., chronic liars like Trump and MAGA elites. The problem is that most people don’t or can’t do fact checking. Liars and deceivers usually have at least as much access to persuadable minds as truth tellers.

Q: Should objectively demonstrable lies, falsehoods, and BS that are likely to cause significant harm be subject to more stringent regulations than is currently the case, or is the threat of authoritarianism too great to justify that?

Reviews of Sunstein's book: 

The Tyranny Of Loud Idiots 

Sunstein, Cass R. Liars: falsehoods and free speech in an age of deception

MAGA supporters scammed by fake AI influencer who turned out to be a man

 A medical student has made thousands of dollars by selling photos of a fake MAGA woman he created using AI

If you take a look at Emily Hart's Instagram account, which has since been removed, you'd see the American blonde nurse ice fishing, drinking cans of Coors Light, and shooting at the rifle range.

One of her captions read: “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported,” while another said: “POV: You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal."

And surprise, surprise, the account blew up, with millions of viewers believing that Emily Hart was in fact a real woman.

Through the account, Sam also started flogging MAGA-themed T-shirts, at which point the scammer was making a few thousand dollars every month.

Sam brutally added: "The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people - like, super dumb people. And they fall for it."

Both accounts seem to have been taken down by Instagram because they violate the rules for not disclosing AI-generated media.

https://www.tyla.com/news/politics/ai-generated-maga-woman-republicans-scammed-influencer-338384-20260422

 

The NYT increases scrutiny of the USSC’s partisanship, authoritarianism and secrecy

Secret shadow docket law

Context

Last February the NYT expanded its coverage of the USSC (US Supreme Court)(not paywalled), finally recognizing the stunning amount of power the court has and its shocking secrecy, and unprincipled partisanship and authoritarianism. Since Trump put 3 radical right authoritarian judges on the bench, that court has been a key source of power for Trump, the authoritarian MAGA wealth and power movement, and the rise of American kleptocracy. 

Prior NYT coverage was limited to one reporter covering mostly arguments and decisions. In Feb. that was expanded “to look further at the incredible power of the nine justices and how the least transparent branch of government operates”. The new focus is on court power, ethics, and internal dynamics. That was years overdue. With some luck, this is better late than never.

The rise of MAGA partisanship and secrecy

On April 18, the NYT published an article, The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court, (not paywalled), based on previously secret USSC memos from 2016. Those documents at this link, show the partisan MAGA take-over of the court and the rise of a weaponized shadow docket that allows the court to decide major cases without a full hearing or any public notice. The trigger for the takeover was lawsuits filed against the EPA over pollution regulations that pollution-for-profit business hated and wanted to get rid of. The six MAGA judges decided to use the shadow docket to gut and neuter the EPA in as much secrecy and opacity as possible.

The April 18 article on the shadow docket uses the internal 2016 memos to reconstruct how the court’s current emergency‑order practice took shape in a climate case against Obama’s Clean Power Plan, West Virginia v. EPA. In that episode, a 5–4 conservative majority blocked a major national climate rule before any lower court had ruled on its legality, doing so in a one‑paragraph order with no reasoning. Scholars and the NYT reporters see that 2016 order as the practical “birth” of the modern shadow docket. This is MAGA’s way to quietly decide high‑stakes, often partisan outcomes on an expedited basis. Those decisions come with little legal briefing and argument, limited internal discussion at the court, and no public explanation. This flimsy policy opened the door to later shadow docket decisions in later major disputes over presidential power and other national issues.

The MAGA judges at the time in 2016 (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito) found a way to bypass norms that required full merits briefing, oral argument, and reasoned opinions before deciding major questions of law. Chief justice Roberts was a driving force behind the creation and normalization of this stripped-down political way to decide major cases in secrecy. Roberts pushed the MAGA judges into the purely partisan step of blocking Obama’s climate plan before any lower‑court adjudication or legal arguments. Legal scholars now argue this secrecy method is routine in presidential‑power cases. Shadow docket secrecy allows the USSC to shape and create policy while leaving the public in the dark about its legal justifications. Legal scholars point out that those decisions are almost always partisan and unprincipled.

The previously secret memos include draft proposals, responses, and strategic back‑and‑forth among the justices. Those documents clearly show candid partisan political calculations. Legal scholars see these memos as archival material they assumed would remain sealed until long after the current justices had left the bench. The NYT reporting here provides an unusually detailed, contemporaneous window into how the Court moved itself onto a more aggressive, less transparent footing. 

MAGA prejudges the EPA -- that’s partisan politics, not neutral judging

So, what did the memos show? They show what a person who has paid some attention to the USSC would expect. The Republican judges made clear they were going to decide against the EPA. Their minds were closed.[1] They wanted to issue a stay to block implementation or enforcement of the law, allowing pollution-for-profit to continue. According to legal scholars, that was not judging a dispute on the merits. It was partisan prejudging to get the decision that MAGA wanted. Those Republican judges completely ignored factors mitigating in favor of the EPA including no mention of (1) any climate risks, (2) public health benefits, and (3) EPA’s estimate of $55–93 billion in annual benefits by 2030. To get their partisan decision, all of that had to be ignored because it strongly favored the EPA’s position. Link 1, link 2

Footnote:

1. One legal scholar commented: What you see in those memos is they prejudged. There is no combination of legal or policy arguments that will change their mind. Their mind is inalterably closed.

Christian nationalism theocracy attacks birth control

A NYT opinion (not paywalled) discusses the Christian nationalist attack on federal birth control programs. A bipartisan effort created Title X in 1970 as the first federal program dedicated to family planning and reproductive health. Title X was the government's responding to high rates of unintended pregnancy that fueled poverty, worsened health outcomes, and destabilized family life. The program, backed initially by bipartisan support and championed by President Richard Nixon, dramatically expanded access to contraception. The program is credited with preventing tens of millions of unintended pregnancies, sharply reducing teen birth rates, cutting child poverty, and saving governments substantial Medicaid costs, all while improving women’s physical and psychological health, economic stability, and children’s outcomes. Modern contraception is a medical miracle that has saved the lives of millions of women.

However, current Title X funding guidelines aim to redirect the program away from its core mission of preventing unintended pregnancies and toward promoting conception. This change in focus aligns with the priorities of anti-abortion activists, and MAHA-aligned wellness propaganda. The new guidance minimizes effective contraception, barely mentioning it while elevating “fertility-awareness-based methods”, which have much higher failure rates than IUDs and other modern methods. The theocratic guidance also prioritizes male fertility counseling and lifestyle issues like pornography use, low sperm count, and environmental toxins, while downplaying contraception’s role in healthy pregnancies and chronic-disease treatment. 

Although Biden-era rules still require Title X funds to support access to a range of modern contraceptives, they are vulnerable to reversal by theocratic zealots. The program has not recovered from Trump’s first-term restrictions that drove clinics out and halved the number of patients served. This shift directly threatens affordable contraception and the future of Title X. It also marks the collapse of a longstanding bipartisan consensus that even poor women should have the publicly supported ability to shape their own futures and families. Link, link, link

Arendt regarding what dictators do to universities

Arendt as political theorist

In 1946 political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote a short essay, The Image of Hell. Arendt's best known works are her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem and her 1958 book The Human Condition. Her essay was an analysis of the Nazification of German universities in the 1930s. Arendt attended Nazi SS Otto Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial in Israel, inspiring her to coin the label the banality of evil. Eichmann inspired that conception of evil due to Eichmann’s utterly thoughtless role in committing mass murder under the guise of just following the law and following orders. He failed to think. He really believed, or expertly pretended to believe, that he was just following the law and following orders, which was nothing out of the ordinary. Eichmann held the SS rank of Obersturmbannführer, roughly a lieutenant colonel in the US military.

Hell in academia

In The Image of Hell, Arendt focused on how professors and administrators quickly adapted themselves to the aggressive Nazi regime instead of resisting it. She argued that the speed and eagerness of this adaptation constituted a moral collapse in the academic class, not only something from external political coercion.

She described how academic self-government and scholarly standards were hollowed out as universities became loyalty to the new power, displacing truth and intellectual integrity. The essay’s core claim is that universities under dictatorship become laboratories of opportunism, servility, and conformism when academics willingly trade intellectual honesty for career safety or advancement.

Does that sound familiar?

As one would expect, when in power both dictators and totalitarians purge and replace recalcitrant and disloyal personnel. Faculty, administrators, and students were generally seen as politically unreliable, Jewish, or otherwise undesirable. They were dismissed, forced out, or worse, and their posts filled with corrupt, incompetent loyalists or opportunists. 

Obviously, scholarship was made subordinate to Nazi ideology. Research topics, curricula, and appointments are reorganized around the regime’s ideological priorities; disciplines that encourage critical thinking (especially philosophy, political theory, and independent social sciences) are marginalized or redefined. Although The Image of Hell is about Nazi Germany, Arendt intended it to be a general warning about how quickly academic institutions can be turned into instruments of authoritarian rule if the academics lack a robust sense of morality and professional responsibility in the face of authoritarian threats.

Arendt’s Hell essay pointed out that institutions, including academic institutions, hollow out and collapse faster when internal elites are willing collaborators or opportunists, not just victims of external force. 

Does that sound familiar?

The status of the Trump and MAGA threat 

Right now in America, and with limited success so far, Trump and virulent MAGA authoritarian ideology are trying to turn American academic institutions into instruments of authoritarian rule. There is clear evidence that Trump and organized MAGA authoritarianism are engaged in a coordinated project to poison universities and knowledge‑producing institutions, and bring them under loyalist authoritarian control. The attacks and goal are far reaching beyond merely getting rid of wokeness in academia. The MAGA effort includes federal executive actions in Trump’s current term, state‑level legislation, and pressure campaigns on elite universities framed as fights over “free speech,” “DEI,” or “anti‑Semitism”. The overall effect has been to weaken institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Link, link

At the federal level, cuts and freezes to research funding are not hypothetical threats. They’re already halting projects and closing programs. That poison has already inflicted serious long‑term damage to America’s research infrastructure system. Link, link

If Trump and MAGA elites get their way by taking the power of academic freedom from universities to make them into instruments of servitude to MAGA tyranny and corruption, they will destroy American universities. Our academic institutions will be converted into moral cesspools of loyalist garbage. In the long run, the damage to American society, international competitiveness and commerce will be enormous. Link, link

What are the chances that Trump and MAGA elites will get their way and take power of academic freedom for themselves? That is unknowable at present. The results of the 2026 mid-term elections might clarify which way this country is likely going to go, either pro-democracy and rule of law, or pro-tyranny and rule of shamelessly corrupt tyrants.

American collapse continues: Killing digital history

The moral, social and political rot that is engulfing America is everywhere and coming from multiple sources, corrupt, for-profit capitalism, corrupt authoritarian politics and corrupt theocratic Christian nationalism. It's complicated and messy, but very real, very now, and very much in power.

Gadget Review reports that major news sites are now blocking public access to the Way Back machine because they cannot monetize that content. They don't want AI to scrape their stuff to train AI without payment. It is now hard or impossible to track down deleted tweets or verify what a website actually said recently or years ago. For three decades, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was a free public digital time machine. It preserved hundreds of billions web pages. This tool was the only public archive of its scale. Major media outlets are now systematically blocking their content because they don't want it to be available to train AI competitors. And as an added bonus, they probably don't mind hiding their mistakes or embarrassing biases.

Publishers justify blocking with at least two arguments, (1) preventing AI companies from training on their archived content, and (2) general anti-scraping concerns. For example, the NYT says that access to its archived content violates copyright law. As usual, details of that are as clear as snorkeling in mud. So, access to an increasing amount of digital history is dying. Common sense (and others) says that blocking the Internet Archive will not meaningfully stop AI, but it will make it easier to rewrite history and harder to hold liars accountable.

The archive is at this link: https://web.archive.org/.

Q1: Is it reasonable to expect bad‑faith sites, e.g., MAGA propaganda mills, crackpot conspiracy blogs, and reputation‑laundering operations, to either block archiving or pressure hosts to do so to make their worst content harder to expose?

Q2: Is this colossal stupidity (maybe an irreversible mistake) by the panicking MSM because they are doomed by capitalism combined with for-profit driven executives and the human condition that generally likes entertainment and generally dislikes serious, evidence and reasoned-based content?

 

God forgives Trump

Maybe after speaking with Jesus, Trump has been forgiven for his transgression of impersonating Jesus. The image appears to have originated from a Trump supporter, and was then reposted by Trump. He posted this on his social media site:

The transgression

The sick guy looks a lot like Jon Stewart

Q: Is it just me, but does it seem that Trump is going from seriously insane to batshit crazy insane? Or, is he just joshing and trolling the libs for funsies 'n giggles? 

Trump is a vicious lunatic -- he thinks he's God!

Trump posted this image on his toxic social media site, Lies Antisocial. He is in a snit about the Pope not being on Trump’s side in the Iran war. 

Far right radical and hyper-blowhard authoritarian MAGA influencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, commented: “Oh hell no. We tolerated this kind of meme against our better judgment because he promised to save America and only when it was clear he didn’t actually think he was the Messiah.”

See, even some MAGA elites are getting creeped out by Trump's mental collapse. Too bad they're not creeped out by his kleptocrat or dictator politics.

Let me be the first to ask...............

 What Trump's reactions will be to Orban's loss?

Congrats to the winner , or late evening/early morning meltdowns?

America's mental softening

It feels as if nowadays most news reporting and commentary is mostly shallow surface scratching and fluff. Is America really being dumbed down, maybe largely because people have been taught or somehow learned intolerance toward either much nuance or cognitive dissonance? Are we being worn down mentally by constant demagoguery, deceptive propaganda and way too much secrecy? Maybe.

Some rummaging around turns up solid evidence of a structural shift to shallow, low-friction output. For example, local and investigative reporting have really collapsed. The US has lost over 2,000 newspapers and tens of thousands of journalists. The share of investigative pieces in local papers has dropped notably since around 2018. That’s the kind of coverage that supplies depth, institutional memory, nuance, and sometimes cognitive dissonance. 

Impacts on the brain-mind and society

Social science says that when local and investigative reporting collapses, democratic and community health suffer across multiple dimensions. Lower civic knowledge apparently correlates with decreased civic engagement and lower voter turnout. When local newspapers disappear, civic engagement and voter participation drop, while voting becomes more polarized. That endangers democracy.

Some research indicates that the presence of local newspapers correlates with higher voter turnout, better assessment of candidates, less polarization and corruption, and greater government transparency.

When a local newspaper dies, civic engagement decreases, elected officials are less accountable, corruption is more pervasive and voter participation drops and becomes more polarized.

Authoritarianism is inherently hostile to independent news reporting because it undermines core weapons that authoritarians rely heavily on to battle democracy and the rule of law, e.g., secrecy, impunity, narrative control, etc. Authoritarians try to gain monopoly control of all major means of persuasion. In true dictatorships, the media are state‑controlled and dissenting speech is censored or criminalized. In dictatorships what is mostly reported is “official truth”. That is usually mostly lies, slanders, crackpot reasoning and irrational emotional manipulation to whip up unwarranted fear, anger, resentment, bigotry, distrust, etc., i.e., bad faith demagoguery.

By default or circumstance, capitalism tends to operate primarily on the side of the authoritarians. In the US right now, capitalism doesn’t directly impose censorship. However, censorship is subtly imposed by subjecting news to the profit motive. The profit motive treats news information as a commodity for sale, not something needed to support the public interest or democracy. That is a part of what is reshaping the mainstream news media from a major source of support for the public interest, democracy and the rule of law, to a major source of support for authoritarianism or tyranny and the corruption that usually accompanies it. In this way capitalism's overriding profit motive is destroying the MSM. 

In short, for-profit capitalist media systems are structurally aligned with authoritarianism and dictatorship or oligarchy. Along the way, we're getting used to and coming to expect shallow, fluffy "news", i.e., infotainment. Hard core news is becoming heavily disfavored in American society.

America's collapse

In addition to Trump starting a war with Iran to deflect from the Epstein files, scans of the news makes clear that the US, and its democracy and rule of law, are in a period of major collapse. The damage is staggering and accruing on all fronts. No one can keep up with it. As usual, nearly all of the MSM’s reporting is too fragmented and siloed for most people to get a feel for how bad the situation has become. A couple of matters touch on the scope of the collapse.

The NYT reports (not paywalled) that to scrounge up money of a staggering $1.5 trillion ($1,5000 billion) military budget, the “peace president” Trump is looking to gut spending on domestic programs. He is targeting ~$4 billion in federal subsidies for home heating and cooling costs that about 6 million households rely on. Trump justifies his domestic spending cuts spending by saying the US can’t afford it. He asked Congress to cut about $73 billion next fiscal year across a wide array of domestic agencies and programs, including education, health care, housing and nutrition assistance.

☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

In other collapse news, Trump has turned the White House website into a for-profit information gathering site. A reddit post was about an official WH statement by Melania Trump ranting about internet chatter and reporting linking her to our 2nd favorite pedophile Jeff Epstein and his pedo friend Ghislaine Maxwell.* 

But, here’s the collapse part, slathered on top of her official statement as 1st lady, something I didn’t know existed for the WH website, was a Trump pop-up ad “Welcome To The Golden Age” presumably a portal to Trump’s grift operations. He likes fleecing the flock. Trump's ad demanded your email address to get past Trump’s grift entry portal before you could read Melania’s rant. Regarding his grift power, independent estimates indicate that Trump has personally made at least ~$1.4 billion since returning to office in January 2025. Estimates of his total wealth vary up to ~$58 billion depending on the value of his crypto holdings at any particular time. Now that’s serious grift power!    

Download the official White House app today!!

Trump ad on the left blocks access to

Melania’s rant unless you cough up your email

* Our 1st fave pedo, of course, is Trump himself!

Apparently, the court in a defamation lawsuit that Melania filed against a columnist who publicly linked her to the Trump-Epstein pedo industry granted discovery power to the columnist (defendant). He is aggressively demanding evidence in discovery about Melania’s fun part in the pedo industry. That has made her very, very angry. Or maybe very very scared. 

To stay in the loop on this red hot breaking Melania is in a snit news, download the official White House app today!! /s

Q: Is this great collapse news or what? 

☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

In more collapse news, the walls are closing in on democracy. a NYT article discusses the MAGA party’s imperial displeasure with voters exercising their power to get policies they want but MAGA elites hate. The NYT article (not paywalled), Stung by Voters, Republican Legislators Move to Curb Citizen Initiatives, describes how red state citizen ballot measures to protect abortion, expand Medicaid and raise the minimum wage have MAGA legislators and governors seriously pissed off. Clearly, MAGA elites are just not going to take this democracy and voting crap any more. People need to sit down and STFU so MAGA can do its work saving democracy, voting rights and whatnot. (/s) Apparently, red state voters frustrated by one-party control, are getting aggressive about using citizen-sponsored initiatives to get policies they want but that their MAGA legislatures refuse to give them. 

To make things right, MAGA legislatures in North Dakota, Utah and South Dakota are putting measures on the November ballot to would raise the threshold for approving citizen amendments to 60%, up from a simple majority. That will fix that feisty majority of citizens by golly.

Those darned voters and that darned democracy and voting, it just enough to make a MAGA elite scream. Poor MAGA elites. They are being horribly victimized by what’s left of our democracy and citizen’s power.  /s

☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

In domestic spending collapse news, reporting is covering the collapse of a big food charity in the Midwest, Ruby’s food bank. That charity served several hundred thousand people in MN, ND, WI and IA, has closed its operating sites in those four states. The reason cited for the collapse was financial. What that means isn’t clear, but it comes in the time of MAGA, which (1) is intensely hostile to charity and federal spending for food and anything else for low income people, and (2) has caused inflation that made the charity's operating costs unsustainable. 

Ruby’s failure was in an ecosystem that Trump and the MAGA GOP have spent years actively attacking and degrading. Trump-aligned Republicans pushed a spending bill that gutted federal SNAP food spending by ~$187–300 billion over a decade, restructures SNAP to push costs onto states, and slashes related supports like SNAP-Ed. Meanwhile, food prices remain historically high under MAGA inflation, war and high uncertainty. In all of this, MAGA elites and politics refuse to use available tools to keep families fed during shutdowns. In this context, the sudden failure of a rural, volunteer-heavy pantry network isn’t a random misfortune. It’s a predictable outcome of the MAGA wealth and power movement, which is hostile to robust programs and institutions that materially serve large numbers of ordinary people (and this, and this too).

Q: Are all those people using federal and private food charities, as MAGA elites constantly tell us, just a bunch of socialist or communist takers who need to get off their lazy butts, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and get a job, or, is there maybe something more to it? 

A highly successful up-pulling by boot straps,

well, boots at least

It can be done!

Attribution of weather in climate science

A 2023 SciAm article, When Disaster Strikes, Is Climate Change to Blame?, discusses the status of weather attribution in climate science. Climate attribution science is the science of attributing an extreme weather event to global warming. For decades, climate scientists could not attribute any specific weather event or series of unusual weather events to global warming, e.g., a major flood or a deadly heat wave. Computers were not powerful enough and existing models were not adequate for the job. 

Climate attribution science asks the precise question, to what extent did human‑caused climate change make a specific extreme event (or series of events) more likely or more intense than it would have been in a preindustrial climate. Using observations, statistics, and climate models, researchers compare our current, greenhouse‑gas‑laden world to a counterfactual one without human emissions, estimating, for example, that climate change made a wildfire twice as likely or a storm 10% wetter.

Over the past decade, this line of research has become a mature discipline with standardized methods and explicit uncertainty ranges. Confidence is highest for heat waves, where the human signal is strong and models are well‑tested; it is moderate for heavy rainfall and floods and still developing for some storm types. Multiple independent teams, using different models and datasets, now routinely converge on similar attribution results, which is the gold standard for scientific reliability. In short, attribution science is not infallible, but it is robust enough that major assessments and courts increasingly treat it as credible evidence.

The science politicized and attacked

Trump and MAGA elites are responding to the growing body of global warming evidence not by accepting and working with it, but by deflecting and attacking climate science generally. They erase real science from policy and replace that with fake science and lies. Trump still continues to call climate change a “hoax” or “con”. He attacks the science wherever he can. Top MAGA officials cynically and falsely describe carbon dioxide as “beneficial”, a debunked assertion, while misrepresenting climate science as a “religion”. MAGA-dominated federal agencies have floated or relied on reports full of cherry‑picking and debunked denial arguments to justify efforts to revoke EPA’s endangerment finding, even as overwhelming evidence links human emissions to worsening extremes. Analysts describe this as a shift from simple denial to institutionalized misrepresentation.

Apparently, simple global warming denial isn’t working very well any more. MAGA does not debate attribution studies or other mainstream climate science evidence. Instead the climate science deniers defund, censor, or replace real science knowledge with false partisan alternatives. MAGA politics has turned climate science denial into federal policy while people in the real world face increasingly intense climate disasters.

Denial

Deflection

A deep dive with Pxy: Regarding what AI is doing for demagogues and why

The harsh view of the human condition

The reality, we’re not idiots, just human

A dive today with Pxy took some interesting turns. The initial query asked for data on how many vocal MAGA propagandists rely on AI to compose effective MAGA demagoguery, lies, slanders and crackpottery. That was followed by a series of related queries that dug into the guts of AI programming and why it is what it is. 

Short answers are maybe no one knows how many use AI to generate demagoguery. Pxy didn’t find any on point data. Also demagogue propagandists could use AI to generate demagoguery because AI does not “decide” to ignore facts and reason in a human sense. So, when AI is asked to generate partisan demagoguery it can and does produce lies, slander, and crackpot claims because it is optimizing for plausible language, not for truth. 

Again, AI is not sentient or conscious in any recognized way. It is software programmed for statistical probabilities of what word follows another. Research on AI‑generated propaganda finds that models can produce convincing falsehoods and narratives. Those are are often more detailed, emotionally loaded, and rhetorically polished than human disinfo, because they “fill in” with whatever sounds coherent even if it is fabricated. AI doesn’t ignore facts. It simply has no built‑in preference for facts unless it’s been trained or instructed to prioritize facts and reason over a fluent, toxic MAGA screed.

As Pxy puts it: The core architecture of large language models is optimized for fluent next‑word prediction, not for epistemic hygiene. Truth is an emergent property, not the primary objective.

How nice, epistemic hygiene. Wonderful, AI has epistemic herpes!!  /s

Why is AI allowed to generate demagoguery at all? It can be built to strongly avoid lies, slanders and crackpottery by imposing fact and logic checking rules. But that isn’t done because facts and logic are bitterly disputed by bad people operating in what I call bad faith and malice. The bad people call fact checking and anti-crackpot rules tyranny and censorship. A “truth basis” for AI would be attacked as biased or illegitimate by people and interests that are disadvantaged by fact, robust truths and sound reasoning. Making a consumer AI that relentlessly privileges evidence over personal vibes or tribes, especially in polarized American politics, cuts directly against core commercial and political incentives that put AI on the market in the first place.[1]

Somatic practices = heavier reliance on facts, 

robust truths & sound (conscious) reasoning 

We are what we are, not anything more

But why are things like that? Pxy gave the expected answer. Paraphrasing, it’s the human condition, stupid! 

In politics, human ignorance and unconscious biases such as motivated reasoning and logic flaws can be major factors because that’s how the human species actually evolved and works. Our democracy and institutions sit on top of messy human psychology and bias, not outside of it. Human political reasoning is mostly intuitive, emotional, biased, argumentative and tribal by default, a good way to keep politics from degenerating into lies- and slanders-larded Trump‑style filth is to build and enforce AI rules that support facts, robust truths, and sound reasoning. 

Political cognition research shows that most people almost always form opinions based on emotion, biases and identity first. After that, they apply conscious reasoning to rationalize those positions, not to question them. Faced with inconvenient facts or reasoning often makes partisan believers more skilled at defending their false beliefs and flawed reasoning. At least with politics, most humans are mostly partisan arguers, not reasoned thinkers. Human biases, loyalties and identity are the human traits that bad faith or malicious authoritarian elites and demagogues exploit. Those factors drive in‑group / out‑group dynamics. The normal human intolerance of uncertainty makes people more vulnerable to malicious demagogic narratives like Trumpism. American authoritarian demagogues are using AI to better exploit the human traits that lead them to wealth and power.

Footnote:

1. Any strong requirement that AI downgrade or refuse certain claims, e.g., “the 2020 election was stolen”, is instantly framed and smeared as political suppression by bad faith actors who need to rely on that lie. That makes robust guardrails for facts, truths and sound reason politically and economically costly. Tech companies have economic incentives to avoid becoming explicit arbiters of political truth because they fear regulatory retaliation, user backlash, and loss of access in key markets, so they default to vague “community standards” rather than hard factual baselines.

Rut roh! If that’s true, we’re in real trouble --

MAGA doesn’t do in-group self-policing

☹️

Before and after photos

Can you spot the difference?

Q: Can any dollar value be placed on clean air, or is that communism or socialism?

I heard something.

 Something, apparently, is going to happen at 8 PM tonight. 

I assume it's meant to be EST.

Does anyone know what is gonna happen tonight at 8 PM?

Should I have the remote ready in case?

Or can I just ignore any rumors or suggestions and go back to watching hockey?

Trump breaks the US Forest Service to help break democracy

Trump proposes degrading US Forest Service (FS) functions from management and public service to a resource for private interest plunder. The proposed changes include (1) moving FS headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah, (2) closing all ten regional offices that have structured FS management for over a century, (3) closing more than fifty FS research facilities in thirty‑one states, and (4) getting rid of senior FS employees with experience in forest management science. As is usual for Trump and MAGA politics, the overall impact is to shift power away from career federal land managers and the public interest toward Western state governors and special interests who can profit from taking ownership of public lands and exploiting the new resource. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4

This kleptocratic authoritarian war on the public interest functions of the FS is not a one‑off bureaucratic reshuffle in the name of efficiency. This is another part of MAGA’s broader project to redirect wealth and power from the public interest to a few oligarchs and loyalist interests. Trump’s economic record clearly shows that tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and targeted deals consistently enrich billionaire donors and politically connected corporations while working‑class supporters are told to wait for a populist payoff that, not surprisingly, never arrives. Link 5, link 6

Mugging of the public interest like this advances Project 2025’s explicit agenda to politicize and “weaponize” the federal workforce by replacing independent civil servants with morally compromised, ideologically reliable appointees. By degrading merit‑based hiring and protections, MAGA elites have turned pro-public interest federal agencies into instruments of presidential will and power and profit for allied special interests. This has nothing to do with respect and support for law, science or the public interest. It is the opposite of that. Link 7, link 8

Ideologically, this is demagogued as “anti‑elitism” and rebellion against snotty coastal experts. In reality it is radical right authoritarian class warfare against knowledge workers who stand between rapacious MAGA elites and our precious public resources they. Scientists, career land managers, and regulators are smeared as enemies of “the people” precisely because their professional norms oblige them to protect the public interest, future generations and the environment. Link 9, link 10

Clearly, the authoritarian move here is to make democracy itself look impotent and corrupt. Trump and MAGA are doing that by corrupting and breaking public institutions so they cannot deliver for the people. When national forests burn, watersheds degrade, and communities suffer, MAGA leaders blame “broken government”. That conveniently ignores the fact that MAGA is systematically breaking government to justify taking more power from the people and the public interest and transferring it to authoritarian ideologues and private interests. Constraints from science, law, and the common good are all being, as Trump would put it, obliterated.