I spent 40 years working in public health for a state agency. Most people have no clue about how much the government routinely does - up till now - to protect health. I live in a blue state, and we do stuff that doesn’t get a lot of attention - but is vital.
Look up Newborn Screening - it’s invisible to most people, but it’s critical in detecting serious problems for babies so that they can get proper treatment ASAP.
We’re going to miss Public Health when it’s gone.
Before MAGA, there was “the Great Society”, but then conservatives don’t believe there’s such a thing as “Society.”
Public health data has been weaponized because as the kids used to say, "facts have a known liberal bias." Data shows the failure of Republican policies; instead of changing the policies, they must suppress the data. Notice we don't see any maternal health data coming out of Texas and other abortion-ban states, do we? It's incredibly embarrassing to Republicans so in the words of our current leader, "slooooow the testing down!"
We now live in an unholy hybrid of Bizarro World and Idiocracy... The 78 year old 'enfant terrible' in charge found out during the Pandemic how inconvenient science and Public Health were - how much they can embarrass him. He is simply going to shut the whole enterprise of science and public health down. Unless he can monetize something to his own benefit, he has no use for it. Just wait until the AIDS epidemic comes roaring back and kids and adults paralyzed by polio is a thing again.
“Unless he can monetize something to his own benefit, he has no use for it.” This is true for all the very rich white men enabling Felon 47. They will never accept the idea that Government is a service, not a business.
This will include privatizing the National Weather Service if they follow through with their threats to shut down NOAA because they study/communicate climate change.
H5N1 is back. We’ll see if this is as virulent as projected. Oh, wait, we won’t be allowed to know because HHS isn’t allowed to notify doctors, hospitals and the public about prevalence trends, mortality, testing, treatment, vaccines…… We’re just doomed?
Blue States will have to set up a state consortium to do what the national health services do. The Red States will send their sick to Blue States to get treatment. Winning.
During Covid, Idaho refused to institute most public-health measures (masking, distancing, etc). When their hospitals became overwhelmed, they shipped patients to Washington and Oregon. Next time we should tell them no.
The Red states have already been using COVID to kill off all the indigent elderly in senior & nursing homes. Killing off grandma and grandpa is a great way to help balance a state budget!
I like the term "state consortium" Now I can submit a question to our state health authority. (The question page is for their weekly newsletter, but I know from past experience that real people read and respond to those questions.)
"Now I can submit a question to our state health authority."
Only if you live in a state where the elected officils thet such an office exist. Here in Arizona, the Republican led legislature have determined that the Democratic Governor will not be allowed to name Agency heads.
The next pandemic is going to kill millions of Americans.
"whenever there is an H5N1 outbreak, sleep with one eye open." Dr. Michael Osterholm, CIDRAP, Center of Infectionous Disease Research and Policy at Unv of Minn. CIDRAP Podcast
Maggie Thatcher didn't believe in such a thing as "society," unless it took the form of a corporation. The Trumpazoids don't believe in "society," unless it takes the form [of the right kind] of a church.
And they seem to have issue with Jesus’ message, so it’s clear their kind of church is one that doesn’t preach the gospel unless it’s prosperity gospel.
I do think people need to look a bit deeper into this quote and the way in which it has been misunderstood and deliberately misinterpreted. She was criticising the notion that society is its own entity. Rather it is made up of us. Society doesn’t somehow pay for things or organise - we do through our relationships with one another.
I was being unkind to Thatcher, but I don't think unfair. Her full quote: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Are families their own entity? If so, why are families their own entity and not corporations? (And what is the scope of a family, anyway?)
The scope of both families and individual is to create corporations. Which are persons. Individual persons. Well, persons with many of the rights; but few of the responsibilities of organic personhood. Err, all-natural personhood.
We read these helpful blog entries. We thank Paul, and Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, the Contrarian and so many others for keeping the candle lit. But we must focus on why this happened why we chose the most demonic, ignorant person to lead.
It’s been a perfect storm. Combination of a wise but remote president Biden who didn’t realize the importance of optics. He never realized how irritating his very voice is. Biden could have for the sake of victory, sent troops to the border if only for the sake of optics. But he didn’t. We must set a new course for the Democratic Party in order to win and win big. As a centrist, I thought DEI had its day. For all intents, there is no more discrimination. There are effective laws. If I was selling my house and I put out a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed” I would be hauled into court so fast and rightfully sued.
We need to rethink our direction or we will have much struggle in the future. Does anyone wonder why white working class and their middle class neighbors largely abandoned the Democratic Party? Let’s address these reasons and make overdue changes or we will simply be playing defense for ever.
Ok, now tell me how wrong I am. Can already hear it.
“For all intents, there is no more discrimination.” And where do you live? I’m in my own house and there are confederate flags waving in the distance. Wake up and smell the haters!
It’s weird that you think democrats are to blame for the GOP becoming a fascist movement and using lies and propaganda to get voted into power. You post the same factually unsupported suppositions over and over. Do you think that if you post them enough times, we will become convinced of your personal fact free reality? Just know that your posting behavior is not much different from the average redhat posting assertions as “truth.”
LM, how do you think these monsters came to power? Certainly by deception that’s understood. But our politics and our society has become so bifurcated. I always use myself as an example. If I do something and it’s not well executed or received, I don’t blame others I ask myself what I did wrong. Now do you get it? Answer: Probably not.
They came to the power by virtue of FOX News and its lesser imitators like OANN, etc. That vomit an endless daily stream of misinformation and disinformation. That GOP voters implicitly believe. And then vote on.
It's said that Trump + GOP won in November because of "the economy." Which, btw, is the very best in the industrialized world in terms of inflation, unemployment, etc. It wasn't "the economy" but rather "the perception of the economy." Generated courtesy of our friends at FOX News and RW media.
No, I don’t ask myself what I did wrong. I think before I do things and have self confidence. I always self reflect to understand on what I could improve. It seems your reflex is to blame the messenger, so to speak, even if it’s yourself. Democrats didn’t have a political problem that could be solved with fine tuning messages or improving policies; we have a society wide problem of the truth being that which doesn’t hurt one’s feelings or question one’s worldview. A mass epidemic of folie a trump and cognitive dissonance. That’s not democrats’ fault.
Do you think the GOP won because you find Biden’s voice irritating? Do you think Kamala lost due to her policies and her race/gender had nothing to do with it? Com’n Bill.
Best I can say is, you're right about Trump's superior understanding of mass media 'optics.' But it's sad and laughable for you to imagine that we have achieved parity across race, gender, class and other lines. For hundreds of years (thousands, if you take a long view) privileged white men (whose privilege was created by exclusion ot others from seats of power) have sat atop the heap. These MAGA moves mean to set the stage for a revival of this situation. Why, you might ask yourself, and in what universe could this possibly be a good thing?
Probably you are right. Again I always use myself as my prime learning curve. I’m really irked being told I’m privileged. I’m a white male. A small single proprietor business. I can’t compete so easily in the DEI world. I’m angry. I always vote democratic. But I’m angry. Does that tell you something? No?
It tells us you'd rather find a scapegoat than address your own problems, and the easiest scapegoat for the gullible is DEI. You white males have been pampered and spared from competiton for centuries, so now that you finally face some you can't handle it. “When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”
Unfortunately people have focused on semantics, not substance. For many people, “privilege” conjures images of wealthy nepo babies, and a lot of white men don’t fall in that category. So they react negatively. “Relative advantages” is more accurate, and that kind of terminology during the 1950-1980 period resonated with my white father and other white men enough for them to support the civil rights movement.
BTW, Bernie and others keep saying Democrats need to appeal to white working class males the way FDR did. What seems to be lost is FDR did push for better treatment of Black Americans. Here in the PNW, the Roosevelt administration insisted the Portland shipyards and the pop-up community (Vanport) that housed workers during WWII be fully integrated. It wasn’t a popular policy with the white Southerners who moved here to work in the yards, but the administration stuck to its guns and Roosevelt was re-elected for a fourth term. It might help today’s Democrats to ask why he remained popular although he did essentially push what would be labeled DEI initiatives. If they can identify how he managed it, they could appeal to working class white males without throwing everyone else under the bus.
FDR also did constant, weekly radio outreach via his Fireside Chats. The New Deal was scary to many Americans because it brought in lots of change. FDR walked them through that in a way everyday folk could understand.
I believe Kamala Harris got this in her 105 day campaign. But Biden never did. Probably because his stutter made him a poor communicator, and he was scared of making verbal gaffes that the Right could pounce on.
Meanwhile FOX News and the rest of the facts-free RW media fills 50% of voting Americans heads with fabulist nonsense. They are the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and the last word in shaping public opinion.
Yes - I've used my own emotional reactions to younger generations' radical ideas as a way of understanding MAGA. I know what my learning curve was regarding those now tame ideas about homosexuality. I had to give myself permission & courage to prioritize a career rather than marrying the next acceptable guy to come along and having children. I've got a young family member in a throuple for gods sake: luckily I knew how to navigate that in my head, with deep gratitude since it may lifesaving. So, yeah, I know how to gauge and moderate the newer movements based on decades of living through some amazing changes in our culture. And yes, the drag queen story hour in your public library was never going to win any votes (duh!)
So I got angry as well. With my philosophical background it has lead to discovering the disappearance of forgiveness in society and the idea that no one's thoughts can ever be "pure". The amount of hatred on the left is dismaying to me. Mercy applies to everyone. "Love your neighbor" means the MAGA folks next door. Otherwise we're doomed as a nation. Listen to us Boomer Karens, my children!
Ummm, as a boomer although I hope not a Karen, I'm not obligated to love the bigots next door and I'm not going to. There is not virtue in tolerating evil. That's known as complicity.
FOX and conservative talk radio, both funded by rightwing millions, have been brainwashing the white working class for over 30 years. Go to the dentist's office in small town America and what is on the TV? FOX. People driving the countryside are listening to conservative talk radio. As I see it, the only way Democrats could get in on this action would be to act like republlicans, and that is not the solution we need.
White working class voters turned their backs on Democrats in 1980 and resoundingly again in 1984, although Reagan had busted the air traffic controllers union and presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression. As Paul Krugman pointed out previously, both the unemployment rate AND the inflation rate were higher in 1984 than in 2024, but white working class voters still voted for Reagan. Fox News started in 1996, 16 years after white working class voters started consistently voting Republican. While Fox certainly hasn’t helped (nor has social media), they aren’t the fundamental reason for our current situation. The Politico article from 5/10/2022 “The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth” has a good explanation of the relatively recent roots of our current predicament, but Bacon’s Rebellion (1677) and the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 are the seeds of our ongoing difficulties.
FOX News can arguably be credited with *perfecting* the RW alternative facts formula begun by Father Coughlin, and refined by Conservative AM talk radio.
FOX News is arguably the dominant and most financially successful RW media outlet today. By gutting their news division, and just "reporting" on crazy things invented on the internet (or by their own staff writers), they've also radically reduced operating expenses.
They and their corrosive influence can be instantly tamed by changing libel law to be more like it is in the UK. Some sort of return to the Fairness Doctrine wouldn't hurt either.
A counterweight--or antidote!--to FOX News's fabulist RW drivel is desperately needed. The short answer is honesty, effectively delivered. Truth + rhetorical skill = FOX News disinfectant.
AOC and Mayor Pete are possibly the ultimate templates of effective truth-based pushback by actual politicians. But while much of MSNBC programming is facts-based, it's not perfect, and can easily veer into mere liberal confirmation bias. Late night comedy can also be an effective--and fun!--form of pushback.
"For all intents, there is no more discrimination". Spoken like a true white person who has never had to deal with discrimination, systemic or otherwise.
Ah, the fake quote (no one said this, above.) Of course there is still discrimination. A true white woman is quite familiar with it. Short white men. White men who intimidate their bosses intellectually. Everyone is capable of understanding these things.
Women, especially, know that it's an unending struggle. Girls have been harassed and abused since female children have existed on earth. It's a serious political misstep to mistake one's more moderate political colleagues for enemies.
If white men have this much power, then they are also needed for protecting freedom and democracy. We all are. Beware of alienating us.
Fake Quote? No one said this? Now you sound like a Trumper, spouting comically easily disproven lies. The very first comment in this thread says this very thing, which is why I quoted it. In case you missed it, scroll up to the Bill Katz comment. Here, I'll even quote you part of the paragraph so you can find it easier:
As a centrist, I thought DEI had its day. For all intents, there is no more discrimination. There are effective laws. If I was selling my house and I put out a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed” I would be hauled into court so fast and rightfully sued.
Okay - sorry. I only searched the sub-comments trying to follow the little lines in my browser. I agree that Katz is a bit overly optimistic about the power of laws to eliminate discriminaation. (See how I phrased that, i.e. nicely and without assuming things about someone else's life experience?)
Now that I've been accused of sounding like a Trumper, I feel duly castigated and will spend the rest of the day on my knees walking through the desert repenting /s
I had to force myself to keep reading after, “For all intents, there is no more discrimination…” although I threw up in my mouth a little. I’d love to know what planet you live on. It must be all white, all male, all straight, no one differently abled, so I’d never be allowed access. Walk a mile in another person’s shoes who isn’t all of those things before making such lofty pronouncements. Can you really be so stupid that you think people voted for Trump because Biden’s voice is irritating? Please go away and hang out with your fellow MAGAts, who worship at the shrine of elump.
We have laws, but we do not have an effective judiciary. We have a corrupt SCOTUS & partisan judges around the country. The laws mean nothing, it’s the interpretation of the laws that matter. Things we thought were settled are being undone as we speak. If you think there’s no discrimination anymore, you really need to get outside your bubble.
Do t you understand ths we lost big time. Not small time. Big time. And it’s time for our side to reflect and make changes. But by the responses here as a sampling, it e won’t so say goodby to America. Welcome “The New Snazzy Nazi States of America.” Ok, shortly a short from my book, “Donald's Vanity Tantrums.”
Welcome to The New Snazzy Nazi States of America
(Introducing The Goose-Step, Two-Step March)
A new dance craze is sweeping the nation called, The Goose-Step, Two-step March. This invigorating new exercise is easy to learn! First, link arms on the dance floor. As you move backward in line, turn your head to the right and lift your left leg straight up as high as it will go. Then step forward as you turn your head to the left and lift your right leg straight up in the air.
It's very similar to square dancing or line dancing. Soon the dance floor will be filled with goose-steppers. Forward, backward, round and round. If you step out of line, you are tagged, the caller detains you, interrogates you, strip searches you, and sends you off to detainment camps for disloyalty.
This new dance craze is not to be confused with serious charges of criminal activity. By the time the youngins reach the age of reason, they will be quick to form into lines upon request for impromptu Goose-Step, Two-Step Marches and other forms of family entertainment.
Trump winning less than 50% of the people who voted isn't losing "big time". The GOP losing even more of their margin to get it cut to 1 vote in the House isn't losing "big time". I suggest you pay less attention to hysterical loud shouters and more to actual math.
If you haven’t listened yet, Jon Stewart has a podcast & had AOC on. It’s a great listen & she has a lot of good ideas to move the party forward. I think following people like her, and Bernie Sanders is what will revitalize the Democrat party. If we keep listening to the Pelosis we will be stuck in the Nazi states of America. The other issue is cutting through the propaganda. The right now controls X, Tik Tok, & meta. And the media is useless. That’s a whole different issue.
Any credibility you might otherwise have went "bye-bye" when you say, "for all intents, there is no more discrimination." A confident assertion that is absolutely false. As far as "sending troops to the border"? So, the way to avoid an unconstitutional authoritarian take over is just to be an unconstitutional authoritarian yourself?
“We need to rethink our direction or we will have much struggle in the future. Does anyone wonder why white working class and their middle class neighbors largely abandoned the Democratic Party?”
I would like to point out that while I disagreed with most of the details of this comment his question still remains unanswered and must be answered in order to correct course.
Whether Bill is correct or not, may offend many people, yet if the Democrats could have converted 2% of the voters to their position; they would have prevailed. Ezsa Klein, New York Times, has put it best, stating we are in a media “attention world” and Trump is best at capturing that “attention” and the Democrats are better at governing. Trump is not interested in governing but rather exercising his power and/or his “attention”. (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000684990756) My apologies to Ezsa if I have misinterpreted his position.
The Democrats need to learn both the mechanics of using the present media landscape and have the answer to this question before they can get results.
Don't forget the Christian Nationalists, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, proven voter suppression (see Thom Hartmann's newsletter for today, long but worth the read) and, of course, the billionaire tech bros and other good corporate Felon 47 a**-kissing "citizens" like Jaime Dimon, who just declared that tariffs were good for national security. We need lawyers, lots of really smart lawyers.
Discrimination never stopped. It was just reduced and went into the shadows. While certainly better than the 70s and the 60s there never ceased to be cases where people were sued for discrimination. But you have to assume that those lawsuits represent the tip of the iceberg for the discrimination that went unchecked, but once again hidden in the shadows. But now the awful people who hid their prejudices, feel free to do the same except now they’ll do it openly.
Not to say that a lot of DEI initiatives were sadly irritating and performative. None of that means the concept was faulty to begin with the problem is that Democrats never pushed back and actually called the Maga folks for liars they were and are.
"As a centrist, I thought DEI had its day. For all intents, there is no more discrimination. There are effective laws."
The DOJ has shut down all Civil Rights litigation, and DEI isn't the bogeyman you think it is.
The president thinks he can nullify the 14th Amendment; the Civil Right Act is a piece of cake.
He has already overturned the EO banning discrimination in hiring in the federal government and contractors.
We have to remember that Project 2025 is the cumulative goal of the Religious Right and abortion was never anything more than their casus belli; ther actual aim was to reinstate Jim Crow
I looked up NIH in Wikipedia and ended up posting a list of the Institutes on my Facebook page (where it will hopefully be seen by my conservative HS classmates.) At the top of the list is "The National Cancer Institute".
I guess it'd be even more subversive, cynical and maybe even cold to comment on FB friends' stories about illness with a link to the appropriate NIH research institute...
Conservatives believe whatever FOX News tells them to believe. No more, no less. As per the Nov. Ipsos poll, 85% of GOP voters get some/all/most of their news from FOX News, and 80% of these live in an alternative facts fantasyland where: We're (already) in a recession; crime and unemployment are at all-time highs; and where Dems abort (murder) babies *after* their born. And don't get me started on the dogs and cats. The list of GOP crazy created by our imaginative friends at FOX is simply mind-boggling.
It would almost be funny, if it weren't for the fact that most conservatives implicitly believe this nonsense. And then vote accordingly.
Thank you as ever for your thoughtfulness. My understanding is that the office responsible for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is ALSO the office responsible for accessibility: DEI*A*. Commentators keep missing that. These actions threaten accessibility for disabled Americans - which should at least concern all of those so vocal about supporting veterans. Please remember the "A".
If we’re truly lucky, these insane policies will strike at the heart of the maganuts as they are the ones who will avoid vaccines, drink raw milk, etc. Those of us with a brain will continue to do what we need to stay healthy.
Where it really needs to hit is that 90 million or so that didn’t vote. To the extent they even thought about it, they concluded that “my vote doesn’t matter”, “it doesn’t affect me”, or “both sides are equally bad/the same”. We are now in the “find out” phase.
Could not agree more. I believe that we need an Australian system of voting- where it is legally required. The fine for not voting is small- about $20.00 and isn't always enforced. But it works- their voting participation rate is above 90%.
I’m biased in the direction of carrots instead of sticks. Perhaps a token tax credit? That would also have a beneficial spin-off effect of helping election officials keep the voting rolls correct.
Agree one hundred percent. My brother works with a woman who is from Portugal legally. She said to him I never vote. I was blown away by this story. Why come here in the first place. People should be required to vote any way they want to vote but they must vote.
That touches on one of the fundamental problems with immigration. By and large, we would welcome someone who intends to be an American of Portuguese heritage/descent. What we don’t particularly desire are those of the mindset of being Portuguese just living in America. The first accepted the responsibilities along with the benefits while the second just wanted the benefits.
Of course there are many thorny issues, such as what “being American” means and whether immigrant communities are insular by choice or are confined by an unaccepting larger culture.
While I have no idea what the answers might be, I do think this is the right lens with which to view it.
That doesn't mean there will be a more informed electorate. If you're drawing from the uneducated/uninformed/misinformed, the vote could have been even further skewed towards Trump.
I am seriously concerned that if/when there is a bird flu variant that spreads from human to human we won’t have vaccines readily available. If RFK Jr. gets it from drinking raw milk it could be a wake up call.
I am very worried that Trump has already seen legit warning data/information about something like: monkeypox, bird flu, measles ,Covid (again) for the U.S.
Perhaps an elevated threat level, or evidence of increases in documented cases or faster than expected contagion, and/or human to human transmission of a previously considered zoonotic only virus.
The withdrawal from WHO did not surprise me.
The communication blackout imposed on health agencies, however, truly shocked me. It seems indicative of a frantic, acute response to something, rather than “something on the list to eliminate/halt”.
I hope I’m wrong, but I have to strongly consider that Trump has already been presented with scientifically validated evidence of an emerging public health threat in the U.S.
A new and acute public health risk + Trump’s instinct to ignore data and lie to the public could very well hiding behind this flurry of EOs.
Agreed. Likely the bird flu, since a week ago Biden had the CDC send information to hospitals about the rise and need to testing for it and not just Covid, Flu, & RSV.
Yes he did. But for example, 500k less people voted in NJ alone this time around. Young people barely voted - AGAIN! Apathy is the real and ONLY enemy we should fear.
You hit the nail on the head. There is always going to be horrible people like Trump but the real problem is most people are uninformed, and have very little understanding of how the government actually functions. The fact that a significant section of the population couldn't bother to vote is the real problem. It's stunning and depressing.
Unfortunately, these nuts are also the ones implementing mask bans, so you can’t protect yourself either. They are putting everyone at risk and the chronically ill & disabled will go first. That is intentional eugenics.
She is in a tough spot. She needs to protect all of her constituents. Crime will always get attention over people protecting themselves by wearing a mask, because it is easy to understand and is universally understood as “bad”. I hope she can find an alternative solution to banning masks.
But the fly in the ointment is that while getting vaccinated certainly helps, if the community you live in is largely unvaccinated you chances of getting infected go way up although you'll probably get a less severe case. Living in backwards areas brings along a lot of negatives. Maybe it's time to get out?
In my family, my great-great grandparents lost 7 of 10 young children to diphtheria, five in one year. We now have vaccines for diphtheria, usually delivered along with the whooping cough and tetanus vaccines. Vaccines have saved many lives.
When we bought the property where we built our house, the elderly owner of the land pointed out a huge oak tree ( he called it a "settler oak") in the woods. He told us it was the tree under & around which they used to bury the children who died of diphtheria.
When is the last time you heard of any child getting diphtheria? Now, because of the DPT shots ( Diphtheria, Pertussis, & Tetanus) those terrible diseases are rarely seen in the US.
How poignant and terribly sad. Because vaccines have been so successful most Americans have no firsthand experience with the fact the childhood diseases can kill.
Even within my memory, my mother wouldn't allow us to go to the public pool. It was enormous. When I was in grade school, the polio vaccine became available and I remember lining up in the gym for the sugar cube with the vaccine. Now I know that my mom wasn't being mean...contaminated public pools were a major source of polio transmission. We don't even think about that now, do we.
That was one of the good things about COVID that turned out to be really bad. Since kids were relatively less susceptible to it, it made it easier for “adults” to play their political games. Nobody wants kids to get sick and die, but when that happens it really focuses the mind. My parents had enough personal experience with polio and saw enough of kids in the “iron lungs” so that when the polio vaccine became available in the 50’s we got vaccinated ASAP. We are seeing some of that with the resurgence of measles today.
I've been trying to figure out if youngsters are less aware of the past than we are. I'm suspecting this is due to social media and phone addiction, but I'm not sure. I feel like we absorbed the past from our parents and grandparents -- maybe not through stories but through attitudes. I think I found out about diphtheria either from reading Sue Barton Registered Nurse books or from Laura Ingalls Wilder. And of course I've known polio survivors.
(For example, I hate to waste food, probably picked up from parents who grew up during the depression.)
As a public health researcher, I am deeply grateful for Mr. Krugman's column here. What is happening now is the prelude to dismantling public health in America and setting up a ersatz version filled with quacks, grifters and conspiracy theorists (i.e., see candidates for HHS, NIH, CDC, etc). The result of all this? Suffering and death. And none of us will escape this. Vaccines work both thru direct and indirect protection--if coverage of vaccination goes down, we break herd immunity and diseases like measles will race through our communities and anyone with waning immunity to the virus, who is immunocompromised, will suffer along with the unvaccinated. And the lockdown of NIH--even if this current one is short, is already creating turmoil for biomedical researchers who live hand-to-mouth, grant-to-grant. Research projects will falter, some researchers without funding will lose their jobs. In a few days this man has sowed chaos with an intent to kill.
Gregg, as I understand it NIH drug clinical trials have also been halted which is potentially a DEATH SENTENCE to those critically ill patients! The INSANE TRAITOR TRUMP IS A MURDERER!!!
So what is the end game here? Assume they succeed in killing off 99% of US population what happens to the wealthy class and where will their wealth come from? I dont get it
Remember the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs? The farmer killed it and cut it open to get all the eggs out. The American economy is the goose, the oligarchs are the farmer.
The end game has ALWAYS been privatization of all government services. Privatization is an especially pernicious grift but a foundational part of conservative ideology is that government is bad and the private sector can do everything better, faster, cheaper, shinier, sparklier. It's not true, certainly not in this area, but that never stopped conservatives from pushing the great privatization con.
Yes, Lisa! That’s exactly what Putin did. That’s how his coterie of oligarchs was created. A small example: when I visited St Petersburg in 2005, I stayed in the Soviet-block apartment of a Russian woman. She used to have to take a bus to do her laundry at a government laundromat (almost no citizens had their own washing machines). At the time I was there, the State Laundries were sold off to the oligarchs. Many were closed so the real estate could be put to more lucrative uses, and the price of the remainder had increased to the point that citizens could not afford to use them. Svetlana was pondering whether she could wash everything in her bathtub. But she had not had any hot water for a month. Imagine this in a much much larger scale…
they are sharks in a feeding frenzy who smell blood in the water. There’s no logic or rationale to it. They want to extract as much wealth as quickly as they can, they don’t care about our country collapsing bc they are so rich they can just move on to another one. Parasites feeding off a host…
First, consider that accumulation of wealth (in the manner manifested by Trump and his oligarchs) is a monomania. As a disease, it is harmful to the self as well as others and follows no path of logic for self-preservation. It is like cancer. What’s cancer’s endgame? When you die, it dies, too.
This is how I see it, as well. It’s pathological. The brains of the oligarch class are rotted, there is no endgame for them because there will never be enough. They’d rather die than stop trying to accumulate more money and resources. Essentially, I see them as having turned into robots who survive by accumulating more capital. Whoever has the most when they die “wins.”
Ok but who will grow their food and transport goods and build and maintain homes and airplanes and staff airports and pilot planes and deliver groceries etc etc and care for them when they are sick etc …
The plutocratic idiots who support Trump are jaw-droppingly smug in their stupidity: they fancy themselves as being the ones in charge. And they imagine he'll give them the tax cuts and deregulation they desire, and then they'll be done with him. But autocracy ain't great for the rich. They've actually got more to lose than anybody. Just ask Jack Ma.
If you haven’t read it, “Tailspin” by Steven Brill presents a semi-answer. The “privileged class” feels entitled to their privilege due to “meritocracy,” and will lift up the drawbridges surrounding their castles as our government withers. That’s the short version.
They want to cut as much $ as they can from EVERY part of the federal government (except what's paying Elon Musk) so that they can provide VERY LARGE tax cuts for the wealthy.
I would have phrased this differently as they don’t care if you die. Just like everything else the ultra wealthy don’t need these services. They don’t believe everyone will die and all food production will cease and whatever there is they can pay 2x for it. They don’t care about infrastructure because when you take a helicopter everywhere including to your private jet that takes you to your private yacht crumbling roads and bridges are of no concern. And it also means you have limited contact with other non-rich people so less concern about general public health. Totally about starving government not about starving themselves. And people go along with it because they hear tax cut and think they pay too much in taxes despite paying negligible amount in the first place and getting even fewer decreases with new policy. It is amazing to me to watch rallies where T says we and people eat it up including when he said we have the best planes and yachts and the crowd cheered like they way they were leaving his rally was in their G5.
The goal of insurance companies is to collect premiums without payouts. Death and suffering are beside the point. The goal for MAGA is a cheap and expendable labor force and vote base. They don’t care if their lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The oligarchs have concierge medical care for themselves.
But what happens when the concierge doctors no longer have data to refer to? That's the part I don't get. They might be able to afford more leeches but if research stops it affects the care of the oligarchy, too. They can't get a great flu shot if no one is measuring data on that year's strains. If no one is doing cancer research, they also die.
Those countries depend on information from us. And our doctors need to know how viruses are circulating within our country. Concierge medical care just gives you priority access to medical care - it doesn't get you priority access to data that isn't being collected or effective flu vaccines that nobody has been able to make.
Exactly this. They want total control of official reality do that it's harder to point out the issues with their narratives.
It will be terribly hard to rebuild after they're done wrecking everything, assuming the US ever manages to again have a respectable President who wishes to pursue evidence-based policy.
Paul, I lost two close relatives to Trump’s HOAX virus during the coronavirus pandemic. My middle brother died on 4-09-2020 after a 7 day valiant fight for life on a mechanical ventilator. On that day, the OAF (Orange Asinine 34x Felon) urged Americans to pack the church pews for Easter 2020 because the virus was a HOAX! I lost a close cousin to long haul COVID. He was hospitalized for five days with coronavirus and then developed racing heart syndrome. I urged him to see a cardiologist, however, he did not and died of a pulmonary embolism! As the former director of the UA College of Medicine’s Lung Injury Laboratory with over 330 scientific publications and over 40 of them in respiratory viruses, there is a very good chance we will have an Avian flu pandemic. In fact, the NIH proved that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920 which killed over 50 million worldwide was an avian flu virus combining with a regular flu virus by exhuming Eskimo bodies and recovering frozen Spanish flu virions and genetically studying them! The attack on the NIH by the demented OAF could have grave consequences as the OAF is responsible for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the coronavirus pandemic!
I think it’s likely, now that 100k ducks were to be killed at a duck farm in Long Island this week, that there was some bad news about the next pandemic coming and FElon Trusk wasn’t going to let there be bad news in his first 100 days.
All of this data you rely on to educate us, how soon until it is no longer available, or wholly unreliable? Bird flu will eventually find a way to transmit from human to human. What happens when we aren’t given accurate data about mortality rates? A nightmare scenario.
I use AI to vet and break down arguments. I’m not a data scientist, but I’ve noticed anecdotally that many of these tools seem less effective at questioning “alternative facts.” It’s a troubling trend.
The world has so much potential to improve, and places like this are essential for fostering that change. I share your worry about losing access to reliable data. If I were cynical, I’d say it has been happening for decades. The past decisions to limit access to academic articles and the increasing censorship in places like China are clear signs of this slide toward authoritarianism in science and technology.
I’m pulling back from the cloud, not because it isn’t resilient—it’s incredibly secure—but because technical safeguards mean little in the face of human propaganda and injustice. Data and information are powerful weapons, for good or ill, at the heart of this concern.
I hear you, J French. I’m worried, too. The attack on trust is arguably worse than that on data.
Take screen saves of all the pertinent info and store it on your own hard drives, disks, floppies...whatever it takes. Oh, and print it all on pieces of paper and store THOSE somewhere else.
Maybe some centuries hence an obscure scholar (if such things still survive) will stumble upon it an wonder how to decipher it.
The Democrat party should have produced an opposing candidate then. The one they ran did not even claim to be willing to do anything about the deep state.
Reading thrillers is a good way to explore this silly idea. Plus they usually have villains in the top tiers of government who are conspiring with billionnaires so there's some worst case scenario stuff that's probably pertinent.
Not so much policy but general ideas about the way things work. But for non-fiction Jennifer Pahlka's "Coding America" is excellent; she's also here on Substack.
As for fiction, good writers do their research on things like the complex interactions of our plethora of security agencies, or what FBI agents really do and what their legal constraints are, or how public officials, political donors, and high level civil servants interact at various levels. The information gets offered in small pieces in the context of an engaging narrative. Readers are free to look further into the fictionalized overviews as interest is aroused. The main message may be the sheer complexity of human bureaucracies. In the thrillers the low-ranking protagonists manage to overcome the Powers, but it's pretty clear that no one is really in control. (There are exceptions to this; for example Clancy's Jack Ryan follows the hero-becomes-king trope.)
I assume it's referring to government research which is been restricted for publication. Although I could easily see spurious civil litigation being used to attack and undermine independent research.
One of the important reasons for federal funding of research is to make it publically available. We laypeople think of scientists as working in labs, but a huge part of science is the exchange of ideas.
From Wikipedia (has everyone donated to the Wiki foundation btw?): The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008,[1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Dr. Krugman, what you might not know (I am a professor of environmental engineering) is that a great deal of the health improvement resulted from water treatment, specifically filtration and chlorination. And just like the anti-Vaxxers and the anti-fluoridators today, there were the anti-chlorine people back then. See as an intro to the large history: https://www.asdwa.org/2018/09/26/history-of-chlorination/
We have anti-fluoridators that span the political spectrum here in Oregon. This is an interesting angle you suggest. These arguments and biases lie in wait in most people's brains. Skepticism seems to persist across generations and contexts.
Besides the data loss concerns here, our food and water are very much the issue in pulling back on public health initiatives in our government.
I wonder how best to address these deeply rooted biases to protect and expand public health initiatives. We've got to push the congressional and state government buttons we have. No compromising on the debt limit vote is a first start. It is going to get worse, before it gets better.
Thanks for lensing on fluoridation. It made me think about anti-science in my own backyard that often I take for granted.
An enthusiastic Democrat here. Tim please look at recent research. Meta studies show brain damage from fluorine at levels only a few times the level supposedly put in the water, and equal to that in some natural water. So there are valid concerns, and levels should be monitored, and data taken on brain health to find an acceptable trade off. But meanwhile, given the availability of fluorine from toothpaste and swabs, it is not unreasonable to take it out of the water. Personally, that may be premature, but concerns should not be dismissed out of hand. A broken clock is right twice a day.
I get it. The truth is the issue. Unfortunately that is not the dynamic of these discussions. We would be better off with controlled use of DDT in light of the good it could do in some environments. The Silent Spring mentality did some harm and good all the same. Note there is natural flouridation in our water here in Oregon at or above these levels. Do you advocate for paying for its removal? That would be spendy.
Thanks for pointing to this. I'm more than open to being wrong. That is what Science is. Nothing is certain. Nothing.
The public good of flouridation is well published- and has to be balanced by its downside. Oral health improves overall outcomes. Flouridation is making a collective choice that in a perfect world would be individual. Our world is far from perfect.
My personal theory is that the decline in trust in the medical industry generally is a result of the corporatization of medicine and the negative effects that has had on public health and the health of many many people. The people whose lives were ruined by OxyContin were mostly introduced to it by a doctor. The time slots allocated for most appointments are short and generally inadequate, so you get what I call “checklist medicine”: you have x the treatment is y, and no one has paid any attention to the chart. I was recently urged to start a med I knew to be inappropriate, and I refused it. A trip to the specialist confirmed that I was right, and this was not anything complicated: people with low blood pressure should not take drugs that lower blood pressure. That med wouldn’t have killed me but it would have made my life miserable.
I am a firm believer in the scientific process and follow all medical advice that I’m convinced has been subject to that process, which of course includes vaccines. But a shocking amount of it hasn’t been.
Many drs are too time pressured to read the chart and they don’t. I am the advocate and primary caregiver for my developmentally disabled brother. I always know in five minutes if a doctor has read the chart.
If you are a fairly sophisticated and educated patient you can mostly wade through the mix of glorified folklore, unproven theories, and rigorous scientific results that is modern medicine. It is time consuming and if you fail at it and a family member is harmed you are angry.
For hair raising examples look at the recommended treatment for non verbal autistic children in the early 60s, and the history of autism treatment generally. (This is an area where people fell for voodoo medicine because so much of the official medicine was also voodoo for so long). And of course the medical industry kick start to the opioid epidemic, which happened because handing out pills is a whole lot cheaper than physical therapy or spending time to understand the pain. My niece was given a bottle of OxyContin leaving in the ER at one point. She didn’t actually need it, and luckily didn’t take it.
What Trump is doing to public health is appalling and he is demonstrating the antithesis of leadership: rather than addressing the issues that have made so many people so angry he is attacking the easy and convenient targets. This is deserving of outrage, but we should remember how we got here.
Important also to note that medical research is not an exclusively U.S. activity--it is international and highly collaborative, with NIH funding also supporting such international efforts and coordination around public health issues.
If the public health conditions Mr Krugman projects unfold, expect public health policy elsewhere to potentially include further restrictions on the import of U.S. agricultural products and, in a worst case scenario, quarantines against travellers from the U.S.
Medical research will not stop just because Donald and MAGA don't like it. It will continue in private corporations and in other countries as you mention. He is really just hurting this country.
The same is true in other areas -- for example, electric vehicles and renewable energy. Donald wants to hamper the development of electric vehicles and renewables, but other countries (such as China) are pressing ahead.
That is also probably true in fields which I have not thought of.
As I see it you have identified the cause of this assault on our public health institutions. Trump came in to office the first time with a general animus towards government but no special one towards these. He did nothing of the sort then. So far as I can remember he had no interest in public health policies. He did campaign against any initiatives by his predecessor in this field nor against any proposals by his opponent. What he did do is campaign against their ways of handling foreign relations, especially with China, promising that his would be better. And if I recall correctly, early on he made a trip there and engaged in heavy self promotion of his ways of conducting diplomacy.
COVID was the one and only public health concern to arise during his presidency. But it was an historically great one. It overshadowed everything he did in the remainder of his time in office. And the evidence shows that rather than address it as part of his duty, he regarded the Pandemic as a diversion or obstacle in the way of some other more important mission he way on and a great inconvenience or misfortune to him. Not wishing to suffer any setback as a result, throughout this period he consistently downplayed the importance of the national emergency this contagion represented, and the measures that were needed to address it. It was as if it were to be merely a little light rain on his parade.
But it was not. It was a thunderstorm. And when Dr. Fauci, the head of our national public health agencies heralded its coming and asserted the lead in taking coordinated mational measures to combat COVID, Trump would occasionally try to get out in front of him and failed. He expressed support for those who resented or did not like the measures like Governor DeSantos. He developed a dislike for this agency head because of the independent he displayed, and moreover because of his POPULARITY. But he did not dare to put a glove on Dr. Fauci at the time. Instead, he took to Twitter. And to a discordant campaign of messaging intended to compete for public attention by calling COVID “the Chinese Disease”, by lending credence to social media rumors that it emanated from a US Health agency supported laboratory conducting biological research in China, by personally flaunting CDC/CID/NIH rules and recommendations holding all sorts of meetings and social events, and when he got COVID, by making light of the effects it hand on him, in a demonstration of his robust health, while taking an unapproved antiviral remedy not commonly available to the public as a consequence thereof, the use of which had been discouraged by none other than Dr. Fauci. Thanks to early detection and the best care available, President Trump recovered after a short while during which he was hospitalized. But COVID continued to rain on his parade for its duration. And since it is more likely that he attributed his loss to that than to anything he did or did not do in office, with President Biden promising more drastic health and economic measures, as time has revealed, Donald Trump came away from the experience with a deep dislike for Dr. Fauci, but not only that as we now see, an animus towards the independent agencies he represented.
Against this backdrop of events we can clearly see that President Trump’s attack on these institutions aimed at bringing them under his direct control and requiring obedience to his will, is motivated more by his anger arising from them and by to gain revenge through collective punishment, than it is by any substantive policy objective that he is particularly concerned with achieving. But since he feels damaged politically as a result his revenge takes the form of the nomination of Robert Kennedy, an enemy of strong public health measures, to head HHS. And pending his confirmation, they are shutdown.
Thus in short, his executive orders directed at these agencies are nothing more nor less than retribution for some personal offense he feels was committed against him.
Which in sum you might say is the motivation for everything he does.
For the three budgets prior to Covid, Trump wrote in cuts of 2/3 in one national health agency. We are lucky that Congress erased those cuts. He did fire the people Obama put in that were responsible for interagency communication. Trump's stupidity is greater than you can imagine.
I spent 40 years working in public health for a state agency. Most people have no clue about how much the government routinely does - up till now - to protect health. I live in a blue state, and we do stuff that doesn’t get a lot of attention - but is vital.
Look up Newborn Screening - it’s invisible to most people, but it’s critical in detecting serious problems for babies so that they can get proper treatment ASAP.
We’re going to miss Public Health when it’s gone.
Before MAGA, there was “the Great Society”, but then conservatives don’t believe there’s such a thing as “Society.”
My partner and I are both career civil servants. One of us was just fired fro a DEI position. We will do everything we can to undermine Trump and protect our sacred democracy: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/dei-public-servant-fired
I am so sorry. Trump is a menace.
Public Servant: Damn him. I’m so sorry.
I deeply regret your job loss. I was tormented by the assault on
sane social policy and by the real concern for everyone over "cash flow."
I'm sorry! Thank you for your service.
Tell your friends who still remain to “inform” on known Trumpers and claim they aren’t really supporters. Cast doubt on them.
Public health data has been weaponized because as the kids used to say, "facts have a known liberal bias." Data shows the failure of Republican policies; instead of changing the policies, they must suppress the data. Notice we don't see any maternal health data coming out of Texas and other abortion-ban states, do we? It's incredibly embarrassing to Republicans so in the words of our current leader, "slooooow the testing down!"
We now live in an unholy hybrid of Bizarro World and Idiocracy... The 78 year old 'enfant terrible' in charge found out during the Pandemic how inconvenient science and Public Health were - how much they can embarrass him. He is simply going to shut the whole enterprise of science and public health down. Unless he can monetize something to his own benefit, he has no use for it. Just wait until the AIDS epidemic comes roaring back and kids and adults paralyzed by polio is a thing again.
“Unless he can monetize something to his own benefit, he has no use for it.” This is true for all the very rich white men enabling Felon 47. They will never accept the idea that Government is a service, not a business.
This will include privatizing the National Weather Service if they follow through with their threats to shut down NOAA because they study/communicate climate change.
H5N1 is back. We’ll see if this is as virulent as projected. Oh, wait, we won’t be allowed to know because HHS isn’t allowed to notify doctors, hospitals and the public about prevalence trends, mortality, testing, treatment, vaccines…… We’re just doomed?
Blue States will have to set up a state consortium to do what the national health services do. The Red States will send their sick to Blue States to get treatment. Winning.
During Covid, Idaho refused to institute most public-health measures (masking, distancing, etc). When their hospitals became overwhelmed, they shipped patients to Washington and Oregon. Next time we should tell them no.
Let them die and make America truly great again.
The Red states have already been using COVID to kill off all the indigent elderly in senior & nursing homes. Killing off grandma and grandpa is a great way to help balance a state budget!
I like the term "state consortium" Now I can submit a question to our state health authority. (The question page is for their weekly newsletter, but I know from past experience that real people read and respond to those questions.)
"Now I can submit a question to our state health authority."
Only if you live in a state where the elected officils thet such an office exist. Here in Arizona, the Republican led legislature have determined that the Democratic Governor will not be allowed to name Agency heads.
The next pandemic is going to kill millions of Americans.
Soft secession.
"whenever there is an H5N1 outbreak, sleep with one eye open." Dr. Michael Osterholm, CIDRAP, Center of Infectionous Disease Research and Policy at Unv of Minn. CIDRAP Podcast
That's it! Sell iron lungs online.
And Florida stoped reporting Covid deaths.
Covid death? What's a "Covid death"?
I guess the next step is Soylent Green.
Maggie Thatcher didn't believe in such a thing as "society," unless it took the form of a corporation. The Trumpazoids don't believe in "society," unless it takes the form [of the right kind] of a church.
And they seem to have issue with Jesus’ message, so it’s clear their kind of church is one that doesn’t preach the gospel unless it’s prosperity gospel.
I do think people need to look a bit deeper into this quote and the way in which it has been misunderstood and deliberately misinterpreted. She was criticising the notion that society is its own entity. Rather it is made up of us. Society doesn’t somehow pay for things or organise - we do through our relationships with one another.
I was being unkind to Thatcher, but I don't think unfair. Her full quote: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Are families their own entity? If so, why are families their own entity and not corporations? (And what is the scope of a family, anyway?)
The scope of both families and individual is to create corporations. Which are persons. Individual persons. Well, persons with many of the rights; but few of the responsibilities of organic personhood. Err, all-natural personhood.
Yeah, when that last telephone sanitizer hangs it up, we're done for...
We read these helpful blog entries. We thank Paul, and Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, the Contrarian and so many others for keeping the candle lit. But we must focus on why this happened why we chose the most demonic, ignorant person to lead.
It’s been a perfect storm. Combination of a wise but remote president Biden who didn’t realize the importance of optics. He never realized how irritating his very voice is. Biden could have for the sake of victory, sent troops to the border if only for the sake of optics. But he didn’t. We must set a new course for the Democratic Party in order to win and win big. As a centrist, I thought DEI had its day. For all intents, there is no more discrimination. There are effective laws. If I was selling my house and I put out a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed” I would be hauled into court so fast and rightfully sued.
We need to rethink our direction or we will have much struggle in the future. Does anyone wonder why white working class and their middle class neighbors largely abandoned the Democratic Party? Let’s address these reasons and make overdue changes or we will simply be playing defense for ever.
Ok, now tell me how wrong I am. Can already hear it.
“For all intents, there is no more discrimination.” And where do you live? I’m in my own house and there are confederate flags waving in the distance. Wake up and smell the haters!
If you were selling your house and put out a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed”, you'd probably be offered a cabinet position.
I wish I had said that! Thank you. LMAO.
No, you have to both do that and organize a riot that puts a 160 cops in the hospital, for the cabinet position.
Hahahahahaha
It’s weird that you think democrats are to blame for the GOP becoming a fascist movement and using lies and propaganda to get voted into power. You post the same factually unsupported suppositions over and over. Do you think that if you post them enough times, we will become convinced of your personal fact free reality? Just know that your posting behavior is not much different from the average redhat posting assertions as “truth.”
LM, how do you think these monsters came to power? Certainly by deception that’s understood. But our politics and our society has become so bifurcated. I always use myself as an example. If I do something and it’s not well executed or received, I don’t blame others I ask myself what I did wrong. Now do you get it? Answer: Probably not.
They came to the power by virtue of FOX News and its lesser imitators like OANN, etc. That vomit an endless daily stream of misinformation and disinformation. That GOP voters implicitly believe. And then vote on.
It's said that Trump + GOP won in November because of "the economy." Which, btw, is the very best in the industrialized world in terms of inflation, unemployment, etc. It wasn't "the economy" but rather "the perception of the economy." Generated courtesy of our friends at FOX News and RW media.
No, I don’t ask myself what I did wrong. I think before I do things and have self confidence. I always self reflect to understand on what I could improve. It seems your reflex is to blame the messenger, so to speak, even if it’s yourself. Democrats didn’t have a political problem that could be solved with fine tuning messages or improving policies; we have a society wide problem of the truth being that which doesn’t hurt one’s feelings or question one’s worldview. A mass epidemic of folie a trump and cognitive dissonance. That’s not democrats’ fault.
Do you think the GOP won because you find Biden’s voice irritating? Do you think Kamala lost due to her policies and her race/gender had nothing to do with it? Com’n Bill.
Best I can say is, you're right about Trump's superior understanding of mass media 'optics.' But it's sad and laughable for you to imagine that we have achieved parity across race, gender, class and other lines. For hundreds of years (thousands, if you take a long view) privileged white men (whose privilege was created by exclusion ot others from seats of power) have sat atop the heap. These MAGA moves mean to set the stage for a revival of this situation. Why, you might ask yourself, and in what universe could this possibly be a good thing?
Probably you are right. Again I always use myself as my prime learning curve. I’m really irked being told I’m privileged. I’m a white male. A small single proprietor business. I can’t compete so easily in the DEI world. I’m angry. I always vote democratic. But I’m angry. Does that tell you something? No?
It tells us you'd rather find a scapegoat than address your own problems, and the easiest scapegoat for the gullible is DEI. You white males have been pampered and spared from competiton for centuries, so now that you finally face some you can't handle it. “When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”
Equal Opportunity was getting it done because it was "under the radar". Under the radar is sometimes good. Being sneaky works sometimes. Too late now.
Unfortunately people have focused on semantics, not substance. For many people, “privilege” conjures images of wealthy nepo babies, and a lot of white men don’t fall in that category. So they react negatively. “Relative advantages” is more accurate, and that kind of terminology during the 1950-1980 period resonated with my white father and other white men enough for them to support the civil rights movement.
BTW, Bernie and others keep saying Democrats need to appeal to white working class males the way FDR did. What seems to be lost is FDR did push for better treatment of Black Americans. Here in the PNW, the Roosevelt administration insisted the Portland shipyards and the pop-up community (Vanport) that housed workers during WWII be fully integrated. It wasn’t a popular policy with the white Southerners who moved here to work in the yards, but the administration stuck to its guns and Roosevelt was re-elected for a fourth term. It might help today’s Democrats to ask why he remained popular although he did essentially push what would be labeled DEI initiatives. If they can identify how he managed it, they could appeal to working class white males without throwing everyone else under the bus.
FDR also did constant, weekly radio outreach via his Fireside Chats. The New Deal was scary to many Americans because it brought in lots of change. FDR walked them through that in a way everyday folk could understand.
I believe Kamala Harris got this in her 105 day campaign. But Biden never did. Probably because his stutter made him a poor communicator, and he was scared of making verbal gaffes that the Right could pounce on.
Meanwhile FOX News and the rest of the facts-free RW media fills 50% of voting Americans heads with fabulist nonsense. They are the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and the last word in shaping public opinion.
Yes - I've used my own emotional reactions to younger generations' radical ideas as a way of understanding MAGA. I know what my learning curve was regarding those now tame ideas about homosexuality. I had to give myself permission & courage to prioritize a career rather than marrying the next acceptable guy to come along and having children. I've got a young family member in a throuple for gods sake: luckily I knew how to navigate that in my head, with deep gratitude since it may lifesaving. So, yeah, I know how to gauge and moderate the newer movements based on decades of living through some amazing changes in our culture. And yes, the drag queen story hour in your public library was never going to win any votes (duh!)
So I got angry as well. With my philosophical background it has lead to discovering the disappearance of forgiveness in society and the idea that no one's thoughts can ever be "pure". The amount of hatred on the left is dismaying to me. Mercy applies to everyone. "Love your neighbor" means the MAGA folks next door. Otherwise we're doomed as a nation. Listen to us Boomer Karens, my children!
Ummm, as a boomer although I hope not a Karen, I'm not obligated to love the bigots next door and I'm not going to. There is not virtue in tolerating evil. That's known as complicity.
Cheeses creepers.
I invite you to visit Waukesha, WI where antisemitism, racism & xenophobia still exists.
FOX and conservative talk radio, both funded by rightwing millions, have been brainwashing the white working class for over 30 years. Go to the dentist's office in small town America and what is on the TV? FOX. People driving the countryside are listening to conservative talk radio. As I see it, the only way Democrats could get in on this action would be to act like republlicans, and that is not the solution we need.
Yes, propaganda (per the dictionary's definition), but only with the truth.
We need widespread messaging.
Right now, when Donnie screws up, the MAGAs won't know it.
By the time the MAGAs do notice, it will have been blamed on the Democrats.
White working class voters turned their backs on Democrats in 1980 and resoundingly again in 1984, although Reagan had busted the air traffic controllers union and presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression. As Paul Krugman pointed out previously, both the unemployment rate AND the inflation rate were higher in 1984 than in 2024, but white working class voters still voted for Reagan. Fox News started in 1996, 16 years after white working class voters started consistently voting Republican. While Fox certainly hasn’t helped (nor has social media), they aren’t the fundamental reason for our current situation. The Politico article from 5/10/2022 “The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth” has a good explanation of the relatively recent roots of our current predicament, but Bacon’s Rebellion (1677) and the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 are the seeds of our ongoing difficulties.
FOX News can arguably be credited with *perfecting* the RW alternative facts formula begun by Father Coughlin, and refined by Conservative AM talk radio.
FOX News is arguably the dominant and most financially successful RW media outlet today. By gutting their news division, and just "reporting" on crazy things invented on the internet (or by their own staff writers), they've also radically reduced operating expenses.
They and their corrosive influence can be instantly tamed by changing libel law to be more like it is in the UK. Some sort of return to the Fairness Doctrine wouldn't hurt either.
This.
A counterweight--or antidote!--to FOX News's fabulist RW drivel is desperately needed. The short answer is honesty, effectively delivered. Truth + rhetorical skill = FOX News disinfectant.
AOC and Mayor Pete are possibly the ultimate templates of effective truth-based pushback by actual politicians. But while much of MSNBC programming is facts-based, it's not perfect, and can easily veer into mere liberal confirmation bias. Late night comedy can also be an effective--and fun!--form of pushback.
"For all intents, there is no more discrimination". Spoken like a true white person who has never had to deal with discrimination, systemic or otherwise.
Ah, the fake quote (no one said this, above.) Of course there is still discrimination. A true white woman is quite familiar with it. Short white men. White men who intimidate their bosses intellectually. Everyone is capable of understanding these things.
Women, especially, know that it's an unending struggle. Girls have been harassed and abused since female children have existed on earth. It's a serious political misstep to mistake one's more moderate political colleagues for enemies.
If white men have this much power, then they are also needed for protecting freedom and democracy. We all are. Beware of alienating us.
Fake Quote? No one said this? Now you sound like a Trumper, spouting comically easily disproven lies. The very first comment in this thread says this very thing, which is why I quoted it. In case you missed it, scroll up to the Bill Katz comment. Here, I'll even quote you part of the paragraph so you can find it easier:
As a centrist, I thought DEI had its day. For all intents, there is no more discrimination. There are effective laws. If I was selling my house and I put out a sign saying “No Blacks Allowed” I would be hauled into court so fast and rightfully sued.
Okay - sorry. I only searched the sub-comments trying to follow the little lines in my browser. I agree that Katz is a bit overly optimistic about the power of laws to eliminate discriminaation. (See how I phrased that, i.e. nicely and without assuming things about someone else's life experience?)
Now that I've been accused of sounding like a Trumper, I feel duly castigated and will spend the rest of the day on my knees walking through the desert repenting /s
I have high hopes that the women of this country will save us. 🙂
I had to force myself to keep reading after, “For all intents, there is no more discrimination…” although I threw up in my mouth a little. I’d love to know what planet you live on. It must be all white, all male, all straight, no one differently abled, so I’d never be allowed access. Walk a mile in another person’s shoes who isn’t all of those things before making such lofty pronouncements. Can you really be so stupid that you think people voted for Trump because Biden’s voice is irritating? Please go away and hang out with your fellow MAGAts, who worship at the shrine of elump.
We have laws, but we do not have an effective judiciary. We have a corrupt SCOTUS & partisan judges around the country. The laws mean nothing, it’s the interpretation of the laws that matter. Things we thought were settled are being undone as we speak. If you think there’s no discrimination anymore, you really need to get outside your bubble.
Do t you understand ths we lost big time. Not small time. Big time. And it’s time for our side to reflect and make changes. But by the responses here as a sampling, it e won’t so say goodby to America. Welcome “The New Snazzy Nazi States of America.” Ok, shortly a short from my book, “Donald's Vanity Tantrums.”
Welcome to The New Snazzy Nazi States of America
(Introducing The Goose-Step, Two-Step March)
A new dance craze is sweeping the nation called, The Goose-Step, Two-step March. This invigorating new exercise is easy to learn! First, link arms on the dance floor. As you move backward in line, turn your head to the right and lift your left leg straight up as high as it will go. Then step forward as you turn your head to the left and lift your right leg straight up in the air.
It's very similar to square dancing or line dancing. Soon the dance floor will be filled with goose-steppers. Forward, backward, round and round. If you step out of line, you are tagged, the caller detains you, interrogates you, strip searches you, and sends you off to detainment camps for disloyalty.
This new dance craze is not to be confused with serious charges of criminal activity. By the time the youngins reach the age of reason, they will be quick to form into lines upon request for impromptu Goose-Step, Two-Step Marches and other forms of family entertainment.
Trump winning less than 50% of the people who voted isn't losing "big time". The GOP losing even more of their margin to get it cut to 1 vote in the House isn't losing "big time". I suggest you pay less attention to hysterical loud shouters and more to actual math.
agreed. He won by 1.5% of people who voted, hardly a landslide.
Pretty sure Bill isn't interested in real math.
If you haven’t listened yet, Jon Stewart has a podcast & had AOC on. It’s a great listen & she has a lot of good ideas to move the party forward. I think following people like her, and Bernie Sanders is what will revitalize the Democrat party. If we keep listening to the Pelosis we will be stuck in the Nazi states of America. The other issue is cutting through the propaganda. The right now controls X, Tik Tok, & meta. And the media is useless. That’s a whole different issue.
The New Ssnazzy Nazi States above read and weep.
Hello Paul Klugman please intervene I need you.
Any credibility you might otherwise have went "bye-bye" when you say, "for all intents, there is no more discrimination." A confident assertion that is absolutely false. As far as "sending troops to the border"? So, the way to avoid an unconstitutional authoritarian take over is just to be an unconstitutional authoritarian yourself?
“We need to rethink our direction or we will have much struggle in the future. Does anyone wonder why white working class and their middle class neighbors largely abandoned the Democratic Party?”
I would like to point out that while I disagreed with most of the details of this comment his question still remains unanswered and must be answered in order to correct course.
Whether Bill is correct or not, may offend many people, yet if the Democrats could have converted 2% of the voters to their position; they would have prevailed. Ezsa Klein, New York Times, has put it best, stating we are in a media “attention world” and Trump is best at capturing that “attention” and the Democrats are better at governing. Trump is not interested in governing but rather exercising his power and/or his “attention”. (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000684990756) My apologies to Ezsa if I have misinterpreted his position.
The Democrats need to learn both the mechanics of using the present media landscape and have the answer to this question before they can get results.
Don't forget the Christian Nationalists, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, proven voter suppression (see Thom Hartmann's newsletter for today, long but worth the read) and, of course, the billionaire tech bros and other good corporate Felon 47 a**-kissing "citizens" like Jaime Dimon, who just declared that tariffs were good for national security. We need lawyers, lots of really smart lawyers.
And we all need to call out the lies and the liars for what and who they are.
Discrimination never stopped. It was just reduced and went into the shadows. While certainly better than the 70s and the 60s there never ceased to be cases where people were sued for discrimination. But you have to assume that those lawsuits represent the tip of the iceberg for the discrimination that went unchecked, but once again hidden in the shadows. But now the awful people who hid their prejudices, feel free to do the same except now they’ll do it openly.
Not to say that a lot of DEI initiatives were sadly irritating and performative. None of that means the concept was faulty to begin with the problem is that Democrats never pushed back and actually called the Maga folks for liars they were and are.
I am assuming you, like myself, are educated, professional, and white if you truly believe there is no more need for DEI measures.
"As a centrist, I thought DEI had its day. For all intents, there is no more discrimination. There are effective laws."
The DOJ has shut down all Civil Rights litigation, and DEI isn't the bogeyman you think it is.
The president thinks he can nullify the 14th Amendment; the Civil Right Act is a piece of cake.
He has already overturned the EO banning discrimination in hiring in the federal government and contractors.
We have to remember that Project 2025 is the cumulative goal of the Religious Right and abortion was never anything more than their casus belli; ther actual aim was to reinstate Jim Crow
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
I looked up NIH in Wikipedia and ended up posting a list of the Institutes on my Facebook page (where it will hopefully be seen by my conservative HS classmates.) At the top of the list is "The National Cancer Institute".
I guess it'd be even more subversive, cynical and maybe even cold to comment on FB friends' stories about illness with a link to the appropriate NIH research institute...
But your MAGA will probably just ask for Trump’s advice since he knows about everything.
Conservatives believe whatever FOX News tells them to believe. No more, no less. As per the Nov. Ipsos poll, 85% of GOP voters get some/all/most of their news from FOX News, and 80% of these live in an alternative facts fantasyland where: We're (already) in a recession; crime and unemployment are at all-time highs; and where Dems abort (murder) babies *after* their born. And don't get me started on the dogs and cats. The list of GOP crazy created by our imaginative friends at FOX is simply mind-boggling.
It would almost be funny, if it weren't for the fact that most conservatives implicitly believe this nonsense. And then vote accordingly.
Thank you Xaxnar for your service!
Thank you as ever for your thoughtfulness. My understanding is that the office responsible for diversity, equity, and inclusion, is ALSO the office responsible for accessibility: DEI*A*. Commentators keep missing that. These actions threaten accessibility for disabled Americans - which should at least concern all of those so vocal about supporting veterans. Please remember the "A".
Yes yes yes!
If we’re truly lucky, these insane policies will strike at the heart of the maganuts as they are the ones who will avoid vaccines, drink raw milk, etc. Those of us with a brain will continue to do what we need to stay healthy.
Darwin will rule.
Where it really needs to hit is that 90 million or so that didn’t vote. To the extent they even thought about it, they concluded that “my vote doesn’t matter”, “it doesn’t affect me”, or “both sides are equally bad/the same”. We are now in the “find out” phase.
Could not agree more. I believe that we need an Australian system of voting- where it is legally required. The fine for not voting is small- about $20.00 and isn't always enforced. But it works- their voting participation rate is above 90%.
I’m biased in the direction of carrots instead of sticks. Perhaps a token tax credit? That would also have a beneficial spin-off effect of helping election officials keep the voting rolls correct.
Agree one hundred percent. My brother works with a woman who is from Portugal legally. She said to him I never vote. I was blown away by this story. Why come here in the first place. People should be required to vote any way they want to vote but they must vote.
That touches on one of the fundamental problems with immigration. By and large, we would welcome someone who intends to be an American of Portuguese heritage/descent. What we don’t particularly desire are those of the mindset of being Portuguese just living in America. The first accepted the responsibilities along with the benefits while the second just wanted the benefits.
Of course there are many thorny issues, such as what “being American” means and whether immigrant communities are insular by choice or are confined by an unaccepting larger culture.
While I have no idea what the answers might be, I do think this is the right lens with which to view it.
That doesn't mean there will be a more informed electorate. If you're drawing from the uneducated/uninformed/misinformed, the vote could have been even further skewed towards Trump.
I am seriously concerned that if/when there is a bird flu variant that spreads from human to human we won’t have vaccines readily available. If RFK Jr. gets it from drinking raw milk it could be a wake up call.
A guy who was a heroin addict for fourteen years is nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary. Disgusting.
And had a brain worm.
If it weren’t so very serious,it would be a (sick) joke.
I am very worried that Trump has already seen legit warning data/information about something like: monkeypox, bird flu, measles ,Covid (again) for the U.S.
Perhaps an elevated threat level, or evidence of increases in documented cases or faster than expected contagion, and/or human to human transmission of a previously considered zoonotic only virus.
The withdrawal from WHO did not surprise me.
The communication blackout imposed on health agencies, however, truly shocked me. It seems indicative of a frantic, acute response to something, rather than “something on the list to eliminate/halt”.
I hope I’m wrong, but I have to strongly consider that Trump has already been presented with scientifically validated evidence of an emerging public health threat in the U.S.
A new and acute public health risk + Trump’s instinct to ignore data and lie to the public could very well hiding behind this flurry of EOs.
Agreed. Likely the bird flu, since a week ago Biden had the CDC send information to hospitals about the rise and need to testing for it and not just Covid, Flu, & RSV.
Exactly my thoughts! Survival of the least gullible!
Some thought Covid might have that affect.
It did! 1.5X the rate of deaths after the vaccine became available. Check it out.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10003493/
But DonOld still won by about 1.5%. Higher rates of Covid deaths among republicans did affect his election. That was my point.
Yes he did. But for example, 500k less people voted in NJ alone this time around. Young people barely voted - AGAIN! Apathy is the real and ONLY enemy we should fear.
You hit the nail on the head. There is always going to be horrible people like Trump but the real problem is most people are uninformed, and have very little understanding of how the government actually functions. The fact that a significant section of the population couldn't bother to vote is the real problem. It's stunning and depressing.
Let’s first make Election Day a federal holiday, and then reward people for voting. The GOP would never win again if we ALL voted.
Unfortunately, these nuts are also the ones implementing mask bans, so you can’t protect yourself either. They are putting everyone at risk and the chronically ill & disabled will go first. That is intentional eugenics.
No one can stop me from wearing a mask.
These nuts are not the only ones ...
https://time.com/6988877/new-york-governor-face-mask-ban/
She is in a tough spot. She needs to protect all of her constituents. Crime will always get attention over people protecting themselves by wearing a mask, because it is easy to understand and is universally understood as “bad”. I hope she can find an alternative solution to banning masks.
But the fly in the ointment is that while getting vaccinated certainly helps, if the community you live in is largely unvaccinated you chances of getting infected go way up although you'll probably get a less severe case. Living in backwards areas brings along a lot of negatives. Maybe it's time to get out?
But our kids go to school with their kids…..
Hey! Don't forget Gregor Mendel. After all, he's the one that made Darwin rock!
Biology teachers who read this will bow in your presence! Great comment!
In my family, my great-great grandparents lost 7 of 10 young children to diphtheria, five in one year. We now have vaccines for diphtheria, usually delivered along with the whooping cough and tetanus vaccines. Vaccines have saved many lives.
When we bought the property where we built our house, the elderly owner of the land pointed out a huge oak tree ( he called it a "settler oak") in the woods. He told us it was the tree under & around which they used to bury the children who died of diphtheria.
When is the last time you heard of any child getting diphtheria? Now, because of the DPT shots ( Diphtheria, Pertussis, & Tetanus) those terrible diseases are rarely seen in the US.
How poignant and terribly sad. Because vaccines have been so successful most Americans have no firsthand experience with the fact the childhood diseases can kill.
Even within my memory, my mother wouldn't allow us to go to the public pool. It was enormous. When I was in grade school, the polio vaccine became available and I remember lining up in the gym for the sugar cube with the vaccine. Now I know that my mom wasn't being mean...contaminated public pools were a major source of polio transmission. We don't even think about that now, do we.
That was one of the good things about COVID that turned out to be really bad. Since kids were relatively less susceptible to it, it made it easier for “adults” to play their political games. Nobody wants kids to get sick and die, but when that happens it really focuses the mind. My parents had enough personal experience with polio and saw enough of kids in the “iron lungs” so that when the polio vaccine became available in the 50’s we got vaccinated ASAP. We are seeing some of that with the resurgence of measles today.
My great greats possibly had something similar. Very tragic and hard to imagine such devastation.
I've been trying to figure out if youngsters are less aware of the past than we are. I'm suspecting this is due to social media and phone addiction, but I'm not sure. I feel like we absorbed the past from our parents and grandparents -- maybe not through stories but through attitudes. I think I found out about diphtheria either from reading Sue Barton Registered Nurse books or from Laura Ingalls Wilder. And of course I've known polio survivors.
(For example, I hate to waste food, probably picked up from parents who grew up during the depression.)
As a public health researcher, I am deeply grateful for Mr. Krugman's column here. What is happening now is the prelude to dismantling public health in America and setting up a ersatz version filled with quacks, grifters and conspiracy theorists (i.e., see candidates for HHS, NIH, CDC, etc). The result of all this? Suffering and death. And none of us will escape this. Vaccines work both thru direct and indirect protection--if coverage of vaccination goes down, we break herd immunity and diseases like measles will race through our communities and anyone with waning immunity to the virus, who is immunocompromised, will suffer along with the unvaccinated. And the lockdown of NIH--even if this current one is short, is already creating turmoil for biomedical researchers who live hand-to-mouth, grant-to-grant. Research projects will falter, some researchers without funding will lose their jobs. In a few days this man has sowed chaos with an intent to kill.
Gregg, as I understand it NIH drug clinical trials have also been halted which is potentially a DEATH SENTENCE to those critically ill patients! The INSANE TRAITOR TRUMP IS A MURDERER!!!
So what is the end game here? Assume they succeed in killing off 99% of US population what happens to the wealthy class and where will their wealth come from? I dont get it
These idiots don’t realize that the rich class lives because the consumer class allows it. AND WE ALL HAVE A TIPPING POINT
Exactly my point…
Remember the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs? The farmer killed it and cut it open to get all the eggs out. The American economy is the goose, the oligarchs are the farmer.
1000%
Actually, I've been thinking about that story a lot lately!
The end game has ALWAYS been privatization of all government services. Privatization is an especially pernicious grift but a foundational part of conservative ideology is that government is bad and the private sector can do everything better, faster, cheaper, shinier, sparklier. It's not true, certainly not in this area, but that never stopped conservatives from pushing the great privatization con.
Yes, Lisa! That’s exactly what Putin did. That’s how his coterie of oligarchs was created. A small example: when I visited St Petersburg in 2005, I stayed in the Soviet-block apartment of a Russian woman. She used to have to take a bus to do her laundry at a government laundromat (almost no citizens had their own washing machines). At the time I was there, the State Laundries were sold off to the oligarchs. Many were closed so the real estate could be put to more lucrative uses, and the price of the remainder had increased to the point that citizens could not afford to use them. Svetlana was pondering whether she could wash everything in her bathtub. But she had not had any hot water for a month. Imagine this in a much much larger scale…
The end game is that the US is no longer able to be a global player
And how does that benefit them??? Still dont get it
they are sharks in a feeding frenzy who smell blood in the water. There’s no logic or rationale to it. They want to extract as much wealth as quickly as they can, they don’t care about our country collapsing bc they are so rich they can just move on to another one. Parasites feeding off a host…
”There’s no logic or rationale to it. They want to extract as much wealth as quickly as they can”
Exactly. The same goes for climate change…except there is no other planet to move to.
Perhaps some of the anti-vaxx propagandists (with Tucker Carlson as an obvious candidate) have been backed by Russia or other enemy countries?
And that is how they make America great and healthy again? Smh
First, consider that accumulation of wealth (in the manner manifested by Trump and his oligarchs) is a monomania. As a disease, it is harmful to the self as well as others and follows no path of logic for self-preservation. It is like cancer. What’s cancer’s endgame? When you die, it dies, too.
II take some small solace in the thought that they, too, must die some day .. I just wish it was asap
This is how I see it, as well. It’s pathological. The brains of the oligarch class are rotted, there is no endgame for them because there will never be enough. They’d rather die than stop trying to accumulate more money and resources. Essentially, I see them as having turned into robots who survive by accumulating more capital. Whoever has the most when they die “wins.”
Obviously THEY create the wealth, once we’re gone they won’t have to trickle as much down on us. SMH
Ok but who will grow their food and transport goods and build and maintain homes and airplanes and staff airports and pilot planes and deliver groceries etc etc and care for them when they are sick etc …
Who’s going to mine the mines? Who’s going to do the dishes? Make the beds? I know robots…
But for the ultra wealthy to feel really superior, there must be someone to feel superior to.
Yes MAGA will be the demographic most injured by Trump policies. True Trump doesn’t care if they die
The plutocratic idiots who support Trump are jaw-droppingly smug in their stupidity: they fancy themselves as being the ones in charge. And they imagine he'll give them the tax cuts and deregulation they desire, and then they'll be done with him. But autocracy ain't great for the rich. They've actually got more to lose than anybody. Just ask Jack Ma.
Yeah, money doesn't protect you very well if you cross the fascists.
If you haven’t read it, “Tailspin” by Steven Brill presents a semi-answer. The “privileged class” feels entitled to their privilege due to “meritocracy,” and will lift up the drawbridges surrounding their castles as our government withers. That’s the short version.
Adding to my goodreads, thanks!
Make that the White wealthy class . . .
AI. They won’t need as many people when they have robots and AI.
They want to cut as much $ as they can from EVERY part of the federal government (except what's paying Elon Musk) so that they can provide VERY LARGE tax cuts for the wealthy.
I would have phrased this differently as they don’t care if you die. Just like everything else the ultra wealthy don’t need these services. They don’t believe everyone will die and all food production will cease and whatever there is they can pay 2x for it. They don’t care about infrastructure because when you take a helicopter everywhere including to your private jet that takes you to your private yacht crumbling roads and bridges are of no concern. And it also means you have limited contact with other non-rich people so less concern about general public health. Totally about starving government not about starving themselves. And people go along with it because they hear tax cut and think they pay too much in taxes despite paying negligible amount in the first place and getting even fewer decreases with new policy. It is amazing to me to watch rallies where T says we and people eat it up including when he said we have the best planes and yachts and the crowd cheered like they way they were leaving his rally was in their G5.
The goal of insurance companies is to collect premiums without payouts. Death and suffering are beside the point. The goal for MAGA is a cheap and expendable labor force and vote base. They don’t care if their lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The oligarchs have concierge medical care for themselves.
But what happens when the concierge doctors no longer have data to refer to? That's the part I don't get. They might be able to afford more leeches but if research stops it affects the care of the oligarchy, too. They can't get a great flu shot if no one is measuring data on that year's strains. If no one is doing cancer research, they also die.
I'm assuming they will get info from free countries--or some other source, but maybe I'm giving them too much credit.
Those countries depend on information from us. And our doctors need to know how viruses are circulating within our country. Concierge medical care just gives you priority access to medical care - it doesn't get you priority access to data that isn't being collected or effective flu vaccines that nobody has been able to make.
What FF and his minions really want to do is to destroy empirically-derived facts.
They want there to be no truth except what the State tells us.
No studies, no research, no census, no peer-reviewed data.
Then they can formulate their policies based on the lies they've already been spreading.
Not surprising, of course, but horribly authoritarian and one more reason to get them the hell out of office.
Exactly this. They want total control of official reality do that it's harder to point out the issues with their narratives.
It will be terribly hard to rebuild after they're done wrecking everything, assuming the US ever manages to again have a respectable President who wishes to pursue evidence-based policy.
Paul, I lost two close relatives to Trump’s HOAX virus during the coronavirus pandemic. My middle brother died on 4-09-2020 after a 7 day valiant fight for life on a mechanical ventilator. On that day, the OAF (Orange Asinine 34x Felon) urged Americans to pack the church pews for Easter 2020 because the virus was a HOAX! I lost a close cousin to long haul COVID. He was hospitalized for five days with coronavirus and then developed racing heart syndrome. I urged him to see a cardiologist, however, he did not and died of a pulmonary embolism! As the former director of the UA College of Medicine’s Lung Injury Laboratory with over 330 scientific publications and over 40 of them in respiratory viruses, there is a very good chance we will have an Avian flu pandemic. In fact, the NIH proved that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920 which killed over 50 million worldwide was an avian flu virus combining with a regular flu virus by exhuming Eskimo bodies and recovering frozen Spanish flu virions and genetically studying them! The attack on the NIH by the demented OAF could have grave consequences as the OAF is responsible for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the coronavirus pandemic!
I’m also worried about an avian flu pandemic now that Trump is hobbling the public health agencies.
I think it’s likely, now that 100k ducks were to be killed at a duck farm in Long Island this week, that there was some bad news about the next pandemic coming and FElon Trusk wasn’t going to let there be bad news in his first 100 days.
You can kiss lower prices for eggs good-bye. [/s]
Inuit.
All of this data you rely on to educate us, how soon until it is no longer available, or wholly unreliable? Bird flu will eventually find a way to transmit from human to human. What happens when we aren’t given accurate data about mortality rates? A nightmare scenario.
J French,
I use AI to vet and break down arguments. I’m not a data scientist, but I’ve noticed anecdotally that many of these tools seem less effective at questioning “alternative facts.” It’s a troubling trend.
The world has so much potential to improve, and places like this are essential for fostering that change. I share your worry about losing access to reliable data. If I were cynical, I’d say it has been happening for decades. The past decisions to limit access to academic articles and the increasing censorship in places like China are clear signs of this slide toward authoritarianism in science and technology.
I’m pulling back from the cloud, not because it isn’t resilient—it’s incredibly secure—but because technical safeguards mean little in the face of human propaganda and injustice. Data and information are powerful weapons, for good or ill, at the heart of this concern.
I hear you, J French. I’m worried, too. The attack on trust is arguably worse than that on data.
Best,
Tim
That’s what I was wondering: Will this sort of data disappear?
Take screen saves of all the pertinent info and store it on your own hard drives, disks, floppies...whatever it takes. Oh, and print it all on pieces of paper and store THOSE somewhere else.
Maybe some centuries hence an obscure scholar (if such things still survive) will stumble upon it an wonder how to decipher it.
ATTENTION MAGA: remember that you were warned about the “deep state?”
CONGRATULATIONS: you just elected it I TOLD YOU SO!!
The Democrat party should have produced an opposing candidate then. The one they ran did not even claim to be willing to do anything about the deep state.
It’s the Democratic Party.
Okay, I’ll bite…like what? What did you want to hear about doing something about the ‘deep state’?
Get rid of it. Most of the defense and intelligence services do not serve Americans and should just be dissolved.
Reading thrillers is a good way to explore this silly idea. Plus they usually have villains in the top tiers of government who are conspiring with billionnaires so there's some worst case scenario stuff that's probably pertinent.
I personally prefer non fiction when I'm trying to understand public policy better.
Not so much policy but general ideas about the way things work. But for non-fiction Jennifer Pahlka's "Coding America" is excellent; she's also here on Substack.
As for fiction, good writers do their research on things like the complex interactions of our plethora of security agencies, or what FBI agents really do and what their legal constraints are, or how public officials, political donors, and high level civil servants interact at various levels. The information gets offered in small pieces in the context of an engaging narrative. Readers are free to look further into the fictionalized overviews as interest is aroused. The main message may be the sheer complexity of human bureaucracies. In the thrillers the low-ranking protagonists manage to overcome the Powers, but it's pretty clear that no one is really in control. (There are exceptions to this; for example Clancy's Jack Ryan follows the hero-becomes-king trope.)
She should have accused Devil J Trump as being the head of the deep state and provided his own statements to prove it.
Isn’t banning research from being published going against first amendment rights?
What the gummint pays for, the gummint can choose not to publish. Whether individual agents of the gummint act otherwise is on them (us).
I assume it's referring to government research which is been restricted for publication. Although I could easily see spurious civil litigation being used to attack and undermine independent research.
One of the important reasons for federal funding of research is to make it publically available. We laypeople think of scientists as working in labs, but a huge part of science is the exchange of ideas.
From Wikipedia (has everyone donated to the Wiki foundation btw?): The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008,[1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Dr. Krugman, what you might not know (I am a professor of environmental engineering) is that a great deal of the health improvement resulted from water treatment, specifically filtration and chlorination. And just like the anti-Vaxxers and the anti-fluoridators today, there were the anti-chlorine people back then. See as an intro to the large history: https://www.asdwa.org/2018/09/26/history-of-chlorination/
Charles,
We have anti-fluoridators that span the political spectrum here in Oregon. This is an interesting angle you suggest. These arguments and biases lie in wait in most people's brains. Skepticism seems to persist across generations and contexts.
Besides the data loss concerns here, our food and water are very much the issue in pulling back on public health initiatives in our government.
I wonder how best to address these deeply rooted biases to protect and expand public health initiatives. We've got to push the congressional and state government buttons we have. No compromising on the debt limit vote is a first start. It is going to get worse, before it gets better.
Thanks for lensing on fluoridation. It made me think about anti-science in my own backyard that often I take for granted.
Tim
An enthusiastic Democrat here. Tim please look at recent research. Meta studies show brain damage from fluorine at levels only a few times the level supposedly put in the water, and equal to that in some natural water. So there are valid concerns, and levels should be monitored, and data taken on brain health to find an acceptable trade off. But meanwhile, given the availability of fluorine from toothpaste and swabs, it is not unreasonable to take it out of the water. Personally, that may be premature, but concerns should not be dismissed out of hand. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Bruce,
I get it. The truth is the issue. Unfortunately that is not the dynamic of these discussions. We would be better off with controlled use of DDT in light of the good it could do in some environments. The Silent Spring mentality did some harm and good all the same. Note there is natural flouridation in our water here in Oregon at or above these levels. Do you advocate for paying for its removal? That would be spendy.
Thanks for pointing to this. I'm more than open to being wrong. That is what Science is. Nothing is certain. Nothing.
The public good of flouridation is well published- and has to be balanced by its downside. Oral health improves overall outcomes. Flouridation is making a collective choice that in a perfect world would be individual. Our world is far from perfect.
Best,
Tim
There is a 100% chance he knows.
My personal theory is that the decline in trust in the medical industry generally is a result of the corporatization of medicine and the negative effects that has had on public health and the health of many many people. The people whose lives were ruined by OxyContin were mostly introduced to it by a doctor. The time slots allocated for most appointments are short and generally inadequate, so you get what I call “checklist medicine”: you have x the treatment is y, and no one has paid any attention to the chart. I was recently urged to start a med I knew to be inappropriate, and I refused it. A trip to the specialist confirmed that I was right, and this was not anything complicated: people with low blood pressure should not take drugs that lower blood pressure. That med wouldn’t have killed me but it would have made my life miserable.
I am a firm believer in the scientific process and follow all medical advice that I’m convinced has been subject to that process, which of course includes vaccines. But a shocking amount of it hasn’t been.
Many drs are too time pressured to read the chart and they don’t. I am the advocate and primary caregiver for my developmentally disabled brother. I always know in five minutes if a doctor has read the chart.
If you are a fairly sophisticated and educated patient you can mostly wade through the mix of glorified folklore, unproven theories, and rigorous scientific results that is modern medicine. It is time consuming and if you fail at it and a family member is harmed you are angry.
For hair raising examples look at the recommended treatment for non verbal autistic children in the early 60s, and the history of autism treatment generally. (This is an area where people fell for voodoo medicine because so much of the official medicine was also voodoo for so long). And of course the medical industry kick start to the opioid epidemic, which happened because handing out pills is a whole lot cheaper than physical therapy or spending time to understand the pain. My niece was given a bottle of OxyContin leaving in the ER at one point. She didn’t actually need it, and luckily didn’t take it.
What Trump is doing to public health is appalling and he is demonstrating the antithesis of leadership: rather than addressing the issues that have made so many people so angry he is attacking the easy and convenient targets. This is deserving of outrage, but we should remember how we got here.
Important also to note that medical research is not an exclusively U.S. activity--it is international and highly collaborative, with NIH funding also supporting such international efforts and coordination around public health issues.
If the public health conditions Mr Krugman projects unfold, expect public health policy elsewhere to potentially include further restrictions on the import of U.S. agricultural products and, in a worst case scenario, quarantines against travellers from the U.S.
Medical research will not stop just because Donald and MAGA don't like it. It will continue in private corporations and in other countries as you mention. He is really just hurting this country.
The same is true in other areas -- for example, electric vehicles and renewable energy. Donald wants to hamper the development of electric vehicles and renewables, but other countries (such as China) are pressing ahead.
That is also probably true in fields which I have not thought of.
Best wishes.
This did not surprise me
These medical research agencies were not very kind to Donald J. Trump
they refused to bend their research to fit his ignorance and even laughed at his very serious remedies, lie drinking bleach.
Trump never forgives any slight
I wouldn't be surprised if the new budget severely cuts or even eliminates money for research
As I see it you have identified the cause of this assault on our public health institutions. Trump came in to office the first time with a general animus towards government but no special one towards these. He did nothing of the sort then. So far as I can remember he had no interest in public health policies. He did campaign against any initiatives by his predecessor in this field nor against any proposals by his opponent. What he did do is campaign against their ways of handling foreign relations, especially with China, promising that his would be better. And if I recall correctly, early on he made a trip there and engaged in heavy self promotion of his ways of conducting diplomacy.
COVID was the one and only public health concern to arise during his presidency. But it was an historically great one. It overshadowed everything he did in the remainder of his time in office. And the evidence shows that rather than address it as part of his duty, he regarded the Pandemic as a diversion or obstacle in the way of some other more important mission he way on and a great inconvenience or misfortune to him. Not wishing to suffer any setback as a result, throughout this period he consistently downplayed the importance of the national emergency this contagion represented, and the measures that were needed to address it. It was as if it were to be merely a little light rain on his parade.
But it was not. It was a thunderstorm. And when Dr. Fauci, the head of our national public health agencies heralded its coming and asserted the lead in taking coordinated mational measures to combat COVID, Trump would occasionally try to get out in front of him and failed. He expressed support for those who resented or did not like the measures like Governor DeSantos. He developed a dislike for this agency head because of the independent he displayed, and moreover because of his POPULARITY. But he did not dare to put a glove on Dr. Fauci at the time. Instead, he took to Twitter. And to a discordant campaign of messaging intended to compete for public attention by calling COVID “the Chinese Disease”, by lending credence to social media rumors that it emanated from a US Health agency supported laboratory conducting biological research in China, by personally flaunting CDC/CID/NIH rules and recommendations holding all sorts of meetings and social events, and when he got COVID, by making light of the effects it hand on him, in a demonstration of his robust health, while taking an unapproved antiviral remedy not commonly available to the public as a consequence thereof, the use of which had been discouraged by none other than Dr. Fauci. Thanks to early detection and the best care available, President Trump recovered after a short while during which he was hospitalized. But COVID continued to rain on his parade for its duration. And since it is more likely that he attributed his loss to that than to anything he did or did not do in office, with President Biden promising more drastic health and economic measures, as time has revealed, Donald Trump came away from the experience with a deep dislike for Dr. Fauci, but not only that as we now see, an animus towards the independent agencies he represented.
Against this backdrop of events we can clearly see that President Trump’s attack on these institutions aimed at bringing them under his direct control and requiring obedience to his will, is motivated more by his anger arising from them and by to gain revenge through collective punishment, than it is by any substantive policy objective that he is particularly concerned with achieving. But since he feels damaged politically as a result his revenge takes the form of the nomination of Robert Kennedy, an enemy of strong public health measures, to head HHS. And pending his confirmation, they are shutdown.
Thus in short, his executive orders directed at these agencies are nothing more nor less than retribution for some personal offense he feels was committed against him.
Which in sum you might say is the motivation for everything he does.
For the three budgets prior to Covid, Trump wrote in cuts of 2/3 in one national health agency. We are lucky that Congress erased those cuts. He did fire the people Obama put in that were responsible for interagency communication. Trump's stupidity is greater than you can imagine.
Alla this, and the medically forced survival of his own personal unpleasantnesses from the covid...I blame the doctors, too.