On the matter of trust vs distrust

 

Deregulated brass knuckles capialtism doing its thing

A NYT opinion piece, The Open Secret Buried in Anthropic’s 300-Page I.P.O. Filing, focuses on the huge amounts on money in play. This opinion raises the usually-present issue of who and what to trust when elites in politics, commerce or religion are doing what they do. In the years before and after the USSC’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened floodgates that held back much of the corrupting power of special interest money in politics, power has been flowing from the public interest and the public itself to special interests with a lot of wealth, power, or both. With the election of Trump and rise of MAGA elites to power, they have blown the dam itself to smithereens, while being aided by additional pro-corruption USSC decisions. What is left for us are annoyances in the dam’s rubble that special interests have to steer their money and its power through. They usually get what they want.

The trust issue is grounded in what by now is obvious to most open-minded people paying at least some attention to politics. Specifically, now that Trump and MAGA elites have gutted and neutered power and protections for the people and the public interest, can institutions weakened or neutered by politicians made complicit by private wealth and power, still give the public a meaningful protection regarding AI’s basically unregulated expansion. Put another way, what if any any rational basis is left to trust what mostly unregulated AI, or any other business sector** wants to do, regardless of how badly it damages or disempowers us and the public interest?

** For example, consider Exxon-Mobil and other all major pollute-for-profit businesses and their financiers. The public interest dam has not vanished completely. But major breaches and feeble law enforcement leave wealthy interests far too much room to convert small amounts of their private fortunes into lots of public power. That is the political backdrop against which we are being asked to trust the architects of the AI economy, pollute-for-profit businesses, etc.

Thoughts on trust vs distrust

Based on closely watching how American elites operate and what they do, a reasonable person can believe that concluding bad motives** of MAGA and most deregulated businesses is supported by evidence. That can be sufficient for the court of public opinion. If one has watched events in the years before and after the USSC’s 2010 pro-corruption Citizens United decision, nearly all the evidence points to the worst motives in play for the elites in politics and commerce.

** Bad motives like corrupt, authoritarianism, mendacious, deceptive, autocratic, Christian nationalist theocratic, oligarchic, more mendacity, more corruption, etc.

That is not a reflexive suspicion of one company. It is a judgment formed over years. There is a persistent pattern in how powerful people acquire influence, justify their decisions, and distribute the benefits and costs. The accumulated public record of bad motives and bad acts arguably has exhausted the elites’ entitlement to any presumption of good faith.

Q1: Have Trump and MAGA elites in power exhausted their entitlement to any presumption of good faith?

Q2: Have elites among the Democratic socialists and social democrats exhausted their entitlement to any presumption of good faith? What about the Wall Street Democratic Party elites, e.g., Schumer and Hakim Jefferies?

Some info sources:

Ted Cruz for Senate, et al. v. FEC — The FEC struck down the $250,000 limit on using post-election contributions to repay a candidate’s personal campaign loans.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) — A pro-corruption USSC decision that legalized this: Corporation $ → PAC → politician’s campaign. Before this decision, this was (and still is) illegal: Corporation $ → politician’s campaign. See the new and “improved” way for special interest money to exert power over our political system by buying politicians and political parties?

McDonnell v. United States, 579 U.S. ___ (2016) — A pro-corruption USSC decision that narrowed the definition of an “official act” for the corruption charges at issue.

Snyder v. United States (2024) — A pro-corruption USSC decision that a federal law covering state and local officials prohibiting bribes, did not cover after-the-fact gratuities. Here the USSC converted illegal bribes to state politicians and officials into legal “gratuities” or “tips” after the politician did what the tip-payer wanted.

Buy me I’m for sale! Give me a gratuity I can’t be bought!

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Can democracy and the rule of law survive with a morally weak society?

 

Does that ask too much of people?

Is that the way to achieve freedom?

Describing an aspect of moral courage or strength

Probably inadvertently, the editors of the NYT raised an critically important but ignored point in their editorial today, Trump Has Failed. Hold Him to Account: Today’s Democratic Party has plenty of flaws, including a disappointing failure to present a coherent agenda of its own. Nonetheless, Democrats offer the only alternative this year to the damage that Mr. Trump and his party have inflicted on the nation.

Well at least for me they raised the point, which is this: Why are Dems so Dog-awful at presenting a coherent agenda of its own? For years, some people of good will have been telling Dem elites in good faith that, for the most part, they are not articulating a coherent agenda of their own. Their messaging was and still is too ineffective.

Why? Arguably an important reason is that for many people facing threatening or unwelcome facts takes significant moral courage. Humans being human, we often we fall short and distort inconvenient reality into something it isn’t. Facing unwelcome facts and reasoning can take more moral courage than we sometimes bring to it. Facing unpleasant reality sometimes means admitting that someone we trusted misled us, questioning a belief central to our identity, or risking disapproval from people whose acceptance matters to us.

This is a moral issue, not a question of intelligence. When our political choices affect other people, which they usually do, we owe each other an honest effort to examine the evidence, even when we would rather not. That responsibility applies just as much to those of us making this argument. The standard is not agreement with me or anyone else. It is willingness to consider or reconsider when the fact or reasoning evidence reasonably warrants it.

Plenty of research documents how people protect favored beliefs and political loyalties. Those phenomena are real, not in dispute by experts. The moral argument here is that we all have a responsibility to resist that temptation when other people’s welfare and rights are at stake. True, the demagogues and liars bear more moral responsibility for their deceit and unwarranted manipulations, but average people are also involved. In general, most people with sufficient moral courage can handle bad news a better than people who cannot. That’s the basic assumption here, but it is strongly supported by research.

The bad news too many people cannot tolerate

What might the critically important but uncomfortable messages be? It might be that the party is over, and the bill is coming due. The truthful message the Dems need to assert but cannot articulate is just too unpleasant. The bad news is that Americans are facing a decreasing standard of living and high cost of living. Although there are economically plausible ways for an honest, pro-democracy government to improve ordinary people’s living standards and make necessities more affordable, doing that is politically impossible at present.

There is no convincing account of how to assemble and sustain the political power needed to apply policies that get at the heart of most of the discontent among average Americans. The central issue is distribution of wealth and power. Improving affordability requires changing who receives income, who bears costs, and who can extract payments from everyone else. That makes it politically difficult, but not economically impossible. Given the intense anti-government and anti-public interest sentiment that dominates radical right MAGA dogma, addressing cost of living for the masses is not politically possible. MAGA authoritarianism is in power and it works very hard to take wealth and power from the public and the public interest, while transferring it to elites and allied special interests.

Q1: Is it plausible that one of the main reasons, maybe the main reason, Dem messaging sucks so badly is that too many Americans cannot handle the very nasty truths that (1) the US is in economic, technological, commercial, fiscal, and social decline, and (2) sooner or later someone has to start paying gigantic overdue bills, e.g., (a) the $40+ trillion on the books federal debt, (b) the additional tens of trillions in unfunded (off the books) federal debt (bye-bye social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), (c) the coming hundreds of billions annually, maybe trillions, for costs of US support for global warming by deregulating or gutting pollution controls, (d) vast damage MAGA has caused critical US infrastructure, e.g., (i) basic and applied research, (ii) trashed alliances with former allies who are now economically and technologically distancing themselves from an untrustworthy and hostile US, (e) etc.?

Q2: Does this moral argument make sense to you? Political demagogues and deceivers wrong (morally violate) citizens by manipulating the information on which informed consent depends, but citizens also bear some responsibility to protect their own political agency (democratic rights and protections), and the agency of others, by making reasonable efforts to distinguish unpleasant truth from comforting falsehood.

Q3: Is it true that when citizens avoid accessible but uncomfortable evidence because it threatens identity, status, or group membership, they make themselves more available for political manipulation, and therefore because their resulting political decisions adversely affect other people, this is a moral failure, not just a matter of excusable ignorance?

Q4: If the US is in decline, is it plausible that the decline is significantly or mostly due to the fact that over the last ~50 years too much wealth and power have been taken from the public and the public interest and transferred to the elites and allied special interests?

Some info sources:

At Least Bias is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives — This research indicates that the left and right have inherent biases. The unanswered question is how those biases influence perceptions of reality and reasoning in the different information ecosystems that much or most of the left and right usually experience. Here, the authors explicitly acknowledge that similar processing biases can coexist with unequal factual accuracy because one side’s media ecosystem supplies less accurate information. The result here is not evidence that the two sides have equally sound relationships with reality, only that the two sides have a similar degree of bias.

Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions — Conservative users shared more unreliable news than liberal users across the datasets studied. That means neutral rules against misinformation on social media can penalize conservatives more without indicating political bias. People on both sides can favor information that supports their political loyalties. But that does not make the two sides equally accurate or their information sources equally honest. That is why I keep posting truth that’s inconvenient to some about significant MAGA propaganda, lies and slanders sources, e.g.,

Enquiring minds want to know all about the Epstein Files, and Trump

 Today, House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a new report about the Epstein files, The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover It Up (report summary at this link). One version of a summary is that there is more than enough evidence in the public record, including this new report, to reasonably believe that Trump is a serial rapist, a pedophile, a chronic liar, and a vicious criminal with sufficient power to subvert and neuter the DoJ, the FBI, and the rule of law as it applies to himself and people with dirt on him.

Sex predator: The released report says: A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s.

Of the 11 women who tie Donald Trump to Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, five of them—Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe—have directly accused Trump of raping or sexually assaulting them in Epstein’s company or direct physical presence: ….. Beyond these direct allegations of physical assault, three survivors speak of encounters with Trump whose circumstances indicate that he was a participant in Epstein’s crimes, as shown by how Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, tried to make (or made) these women available for sex.

In total, more than 25 different women—some connected to Epstein and many not—have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct. His ex-wife Ivana Trump stated in a sworn deposition during their divorce proceedings that Trump had physically and sexually assaulted her in 1989, pulling out clumps of her hair and raping her after an argument.

In the face of this wave of evidence, the only recourse for the President has been to spread lies and obfuscation. In July 2019, after Epstein was arrested on charges of conspiracy to traffic minors, Donald Trump claimed that he knew Epstein “just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him” and insisted that he “had no idea” about Epstein’s crimes. This evasion and this denial are contradicted by almost all of the available evidence, including Trump and Epstein’s own words and the documents contained in the Epstein files.

Subversion of the FBI and DOJ: The released report says: The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it. From the very first weeks of the Trump Administration, DOJ shut down ongoing criminal investigations into Epstein’s enablers and co-conspirators, lied about clear evidence of crimes in its possession, and sought to silence survivors. In July 2025, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and one of his senior deputies, Emil Bove—both former criminal defense lawyers for Donald Trump—released a memorandum stating that DOJ and FBI had determined that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files would be “appropriate or warranted.”

Instead of pursuing justice for Epstein’s survivors, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and Attorney General Blanche have been running DOJ like a private legal defense firm for their former client. Determined to protect the President at any cost, DOJ itself now leads the cover-up of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

Chronic liar: Trump lied to the public about his sex with Stormy Daniels and the later payoff to buy her silence. Cohen Plea Deal Exposes Repeated False Claims, Silk pajamas, spanking and questions about STDs: Stormy Daniels details sexual encounter with Trump, Get Caught Up: Trump’s Alleged Affair With Adult Film Star Stormy Daniels, Stormy Daniels Said 2018 Letter Denying She Had Sex With Trump Is a ‘Lie’

Also, there’s a nice graphic showing that based on 1,000 fact checks, about 76% of Trump’s assertions are “mostly false”, “false”, or “pants on fire”.

What PolitiFact learned in 1,000 fact-checks of Donald Trump

There is far more evidence in the public record, but this is a short summary showing that Trump is a vicious lying liar.

Q: Is it reasonable and evidence-based to believe that Trump is a chronic liar and a sex predator with sufficient power to corrupt the DOJ and FBI, or is that just vicious fact checkers and Dems lying and smearing Trump’s good name?

Time is not on our side

 And maybe there’s not much time left for our what is left of our fading democracy, rule of law, and civil liberties. That will depend on how the midterm elections come out. If the MAGA party retains a significant degree of control of the House or the Senate, it’s probably (more likely than not) game over for us by the Nov. 2028 elections.

By significant I mean (1) enough MAGA votes in the Senate to filibuster everything the Dems want to do, and to be unable to override Trump’s promised tidal wave of vetoes, and (2) enough MAGA votes in the House to constantly sabotage Dem bills. In the House, a slim majority won’t cut it. As we all know, the Dems will almost certainly be fatally fragmented and unable to get their shit together. All the MAGA politicians have to do is stick together, something they are very good at doing.

The main point this OP is arguing is pretty simple. By not winning overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, the Dems will be stymied. There will be another 2 years of congressional failure, gridlock, and believe it or not, further drift into tyranny and kleptocracy. When government is corrupted and broken, as it now is, time weighs heavily against democracy, the rule of law and our precious civil liberties. When government is broken and corrupted, the more time that passes, the weaker our defenses become. It’s siege warfare. We are stranded and our defenses are constantly weakening.

A person paying attention to MAGA politics, tactics and policy related to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties since Jan. 2017 when Trump was sworn into office the first time can easily see how close we are to degenerating into a true, cruel, bigoted kleptocratic tyranny. We’re close to that end.

An example of the slow but constant advance of MAGA’s siege against our defenses

An article The Nation published, The Fall of Scientific American, is a great example of how MAGA wears down and neuters our democracy and its defending institutions. Recently the owner of SciAm, Springer Nature, decided to sell SciAm to LabX. Springer is a publisher of serious, high quality science journals including the top science publication in the world, Nature. LabX publishes sensational stuff for clickbait purposes. Springer said to sold SciAm so it could concentrate on academic research and scientific publishing. The thing is though, SciAm is focused on academic research and scientific publishing.

So why sell a high quality science publication like SciAm to a crappy publisher? Money. With MAGA and corrupt capitalism, it always involves money and the power to move it where the elites in power want it to move.

What triggered the SciAm sale to a crappy business was a May 2025 editorial, Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. It’s no surprise that Trump and MAGA elites were super pissed off with that. Tyrants and kleptocrats vehemently hate criticism accompanied by inconvenient facts, truths, and reasoning. Reality make them look bad because they are bad.

MAGA’s political pressure threatened the parent company’s business. Springer Nature faced the potential loss of as much as $25 million in federal contracts after Trump canceled subscriptions to its scientific publications. Internal recordings show executives feared that SciAm’s criticism of Trump endangered their much larger academic-publishing business.

Corporate intervention changed editorial decisions. The Nation’s article documents management’s insistence on softening an opinion piece about government intimidation of scientific journals. After the May 2025 column, management suspended the opinion department’s publishing. Its editors were reassigned. Editor in chief David Ewalt acknowledged temporarily discouraging “Trump” in headlines because the word attracted corporate scrutiny. Ewalt wanted less “editorializing” and more factual reporting, arguing that rigorous news coverage could challenge the administration without jeopardizing the magazine.

Well, as we all know by now, rigorous MSM news coverage catastrophically failed to challenge Trump and rising MAGA tyranny and corruption. Ever since 2017 when it became clear who and what Trump and MAGA were, a few of us have been incessantly warning elites in the MSM (and the Dem Party) of the threat. Not surprisingly, those fine (arrogant, clueless and/or complicit) elites have been equally constantly ignoring the warnings. They acted and still act as if everything was/is more or less normal. Maybe a bit nastier than usual, but still mostly normal.

Anyway, SciAm staff who had not been fired or coerced into retirement wanted to form a labor union to protect SciAm’s editorial independence. What did Springer do? Springer announced the SciAm sale to LabX on June 23, 2026. That was three days before union votes were scheduled to be counted. The union alleged that the restructuring and sale were intended to defeat organizing; the article reports that the related NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) case remained open. But as we all know by now, Trump and MAGA elites have neutered the NLRB (another link), so those employees can go pound sand. Federal law is absolutely not going to protect them — MAGA policy has made damned sure of that worker complaints will be ignored or outright rejected by deeply corrupt MAGAfied government.

Power and wealth flows from protected workers (and consumers) to elite owners. That is MAGA’s core economic agenda and it always has been.

Q1: If the Dems do not win overwhelming control of the House and Senate, which they probably won’t, will we probably will lose having a meaningful democracy, rule of law and civil liberties by Nov. 2028, because as long as Trump and MAGA elites have sufficient power they will continue to wear down our defenses?

Q2: Is science inseparable from politics and social conditions, and thus SciAm commenting on the connections between science, and politics and society important for the public to be aware of?