WTF, NPR?

Here’s a little cartoon that nicely summarizes my attitude towards all those people who voted for Trump.

Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy. Don’t try to tell me it was nothing personal, you just wanted lower grocery prices (I have news for you — you won’t be getting them), that I’m bad for letting politics interfere with friendship. It’s you that stabbed me and all my friends and a few million innocents with your politics.

That goes for NPR, too. They have a story about a couple in which the wife leapt down the MAGA rabbithole.

Late one night in June 2020, Katrina Vaillancourt lay awake in her bedroom, overwhelmed by the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to sleep, she pressed play on an online video series that a friend had sent.

The videos’ narrator promised to reveal “evidence of an elite plan so evil, so all encompassing, that people will be shocked to the core.”

The dizzying 10-part video series was called Fall of the Cabal. It promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that society is controlled by a satanic cabal that is abusing children. Vaillancourt would later think back on this moment as the point at which her beliefs radically changed overnight, rupturing her closest relationships — including the one with her then-fiancé, Stephen Ghiglieri, who was asleep beside her.

This is a horror story. It couldn’t be worse if instead, she had a debilitating stroke. This was a devastating, near instantaneous transformation that would have warranted an emergency trip to the hospital. NPR treats it as a mundane change of opinion, though.

As Vaillancourt watched, her initial skepticism gave way to a feeling of devastation. She was relieved when the final episodes claimed a group of government insiders was working on a plan to take down the cabal with then-President Donald Trump’s help. The narrator called the president a “genius, a 5-D chess player, a man with a huge heart.” A “golden age” was on the way.

“I felt nauseated by the sight or the sound of Trump prior to this particular night,” Vaillancourt said. But at a time when the world felt chaotic and uncertain, the message in the series gave her hope. “My fear dissolved,” she recalled. “I felt this beaming of love” and “like the curtain had been thrown wide open.”

Dear god. Was she poisoned? Was she always this gullible and delusional? Don’t worry, though, she got “better”.

Vaillancourt voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even though he had dropped out of the race. Trump has picked him to be part of his administration, which she says has given her a reason to feel optimistic.

“I have been of an opinion that’s different than Stephen’s [her husband],” she said. “And that’s a difficult thing for me to even say right here. I don’t share the fear that so many people around me do. That’s difficult to acknowledge too.”

This lunatic woman and her husband have reconciled…and NPR treats this as a happy ending. See, they just have different opinions — she may have voted for a manic anti-vaxxer, she may see a wanna-be dictator who wants to deport millions and deny health care to women, but love will find a way and she will face no consequences from her insane views.

She sounds like the kind of person who loves NPR.

He is both an airhead & a rabid Christian nationalist

Pete Hegseth is much more than just a Fox News airhead. He’s a man with a plan.

When Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense, concerns were raised immediately about Hegseth’s undisguised Christian nationalism.

Hegseth, who has admitted that his multiple crusader tattoos got him “deemed an extremist” by his own National Guard unit, has deep ties to misogynistic Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson.

On Monday, Hegseth appeared on the “CrossPolitic” podcast, which is hosted by Toby Sumpter and Gabe Rench, both of whom are closely tied to Wilson and his church.

Douglas Wilson often seems to fly under the radar, but he’s a far-right religious nutjob. Hegseth is cut from the same cloth, apparently. This is not someone you want overseeing the military, especially given his plan to start a culture war.

During the discussion about Hegseth’s book “Battle For The American Mind,” Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.

“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.

“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”

“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”

He learned a lot in Afghanistan. I don’t think it would be too hard to translate to the USA — one nation infested with heavily armed, rabid Abrahamic fanatics is much like another.

Role models for the religious right

Posturing buffoon

Trump wants to destroy the Department of Education. Can he actually do that?

Technically, yes.

However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”

That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.

So probably not. If it gets to the point that Trump’s whims of all sorts can be implemented, we’ll be so screwed that we’ll be praying for the Canadians to invade. If he did manage to get his wish, I don’t think he’s aware of the consequences.

Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.”

Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students.

As usual, the Republican electorate was too stupid to realize that they were hurting themselves. Or maybe they think it was worth it to hurt their citizens who are handicapped, or gay, or trans, because while it is taking money away from them, it’s taking that money specifically from people they hate.

Even if the DOE isn’t abolished, they can worm their way into it and wreck all kinds of policies. For instance…

Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”

I’m at a university that I would generally class as “woke,” and that’s a good thing. I have so many students who I wouldn’t get to know if we were anti-woke, which generally involves only supporting straight white Christian men.

How could they pass me over?

Too true — all these unqualified boobs are getting appointed to positions of power.

I am so disappointed. When I became an associate professor, I was told that I get to have all the power.

Maybe once they get done handing out titles to TV personalities, and then podcasters, and then YouTube personalities, and then Tik-Tokkers, they’ll get around to passing out a few token titles to bloggers at the bottom of the barrel.

The professors are outright excluded from the halls of power. They know things.

I may have to put my retirement plans on hold

I was planning to go into phased retirement at the end of the next school year. I’d told the chair of my division, and had warned all my faculty colleagues, but now…I’m not so sure. This might be a bad time to suffer a reduction in income and to throw myself on the mercies of our health care system.

Trump’s picks to lead US health agencies:
HHS – Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
NIH – Jay Bhattacharya
CMS – Mehmet Oz
CDC – Joseph Ladapo (TBC)
FDA – Marty Makary (TBC)
Surgeon General – Casey Means/Vinay Prasad (TBC)

That is a stunning list of quacks and incompetents. Do I really want to give up my good university health insurance to rely on whatever these humbugs and charlatans cobble up? Fortunately, I have not yet made any legal commitments to retire, so I could rethink everything and continue to inflict myself on a few more cohorts of incoming students. I would rather they got a fresh new face, and that I got to relax for a few years — I know you might think I’ve got an easy job, but still I can feel my stress levels skyrocketing every semester.

So now I’m uncertain. I might have to linger on until the walls of the ivory tower crumble down around me. Which may not take long: Trump is also appointing the wife of a corrupt wrestling promoter, Linda McMahon, to be Secretary of Education. She has no qualifications, of course. This is a clear indication that the intent is to tear down the entire edifice of our school system, and I’m sure higher education is on the chopping block. Maybe I’ll just die with the American universities instead of getting a few years of rest.

Or less dramatically, I’ll be one of a multitude of casualties when the next epidemic sweeps across the nation.

The president is a troll

He’s leaking the idea that he might appoint Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, to be the Secretary of Education, a department that he has also threatened to eliminate. This is pure power-mad arbitrary trolling. It’s not as if she has any qualifications for the job.

Among the early arguments against Justice, the foremost is her lack of a college degree, which may be met with criticism from one or two moderate Republican Senators but is unlikely to push any into the “nay” camp.

That tracks. He’s got a pattern of promoting the most ignorant, hateful people to positions of power because he know it will get a reaction from his opponents and get him on the news. It’s a troll move.

You know who else is a petty hateful troll? Nancy Mace.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) set off a firestorm on Capitol Hill with a bill to keep Sarah McBride, soon to be the first transgender member of Congress, from accessing the women’s bathrooms at the Capitol.

Why it matters: The measure is not being immediately dismissed by Republican leadership, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) telling Axios, “We’re going to talk about that. We’re working on the issue.”

He lies, he’s not working on the issue. He’s going to let it ferment as a distraction, because hate is the center of the Republican way. This is how they’ll also get the most anti-woman legislation done, by making hateful women the face of their party on those issues.

I am so sorry for what misery trans men and women are going to go through in the coming years.

Sale of InfoWars halted

It sure must be handy to be able to lead a billionaire around by his dick. Elon Musk is using his wealth to stop a result Trump doesn’t like.

Last week, satirical news website The Onion announced acquiring InfoWars in a court-ordered sale.

Subsequently, Musk-owned social media platform X “entered an appearance” – a legal term expressing the intention to take part in proceedings – asking the federal court that it be included on any future communications about the case.

As a result, a federal bankruptcy judge temporarily halted the transfer of InfoWars to The Onion while ordering an “evidentiary hearing” to review the auction process aimed at ensuring the “process and transparency”.

Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas Southern District warned people against feeling “comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing takes place next week.

On the one hand, The Onion CEO Ben Collins is insisting that his company has won the bid fair and square and that the only thing pending was “standard processes”. Collins plans to relaunch InfoWars as a “satirised version of itself” in January.

On the other hand, Jones, who is a vocal Trump supporter, has hailed the court’s review order. “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed,” he said, implying that the president-elect is unhappy with the court-ordered sale of a news platform that has consistently supported the 45th US president.

So many questions. Why did a judge decide to include an unrelated third party in the proceedings? What gives Trump the right to interfere? Why is Musk doing the bidding of Trump? Why did they bother to have an auction if some random asshole can swoop in and invalidate the results?

Goodbye, NIH

The National Institutes of Health is a hugely successful organization behind modern biomedical research in the USA — among their many goals was establishing policy for dealing with infectious disease, as well as funding research in vaccines.

You already know what the know-nothings and anti-intellectuals of the MAGA movement think of the NIH. They’ve been opposing rational responses to the pandemic for years now, and one of the big names in the anti-NIH, anti-Fauci, anti-masking, anti-vaccine mob was Jay Bhattacharya. So guess what’s going to happen?

Bhattacharya, who holds a medical degree and PhD from Stanford, has never held a senior government position, nor any role overseeing a large bureaucratic organization. While that might have stymied his candidacy in prior administrations, Kennedy and his allies view his inexperience as a positive, saying they are seeking reformers willing to battle the bureaucracy.

Inexperience is a positive with these people.

Let’s hope we don’t have another disease outbreak in the next few years. We already know that Kennedy wants to starve infectious disease research, and with a MAGA ideologue running the NIH…people are going to die that wouldn’t need to.

Et tu, NPR?

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this — NPR has always been a news source for comfortable liberals who want soft voices and current events delivered gently, without any trace of alarm. They’ve got tote bags to give away and coffee table books to sell! They’ve responded to the incoming wave of ignorance with a puff-piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that doesn’t use the word “unqualified” even once.

Trump has threatened to appoint RFK Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He doesn’t have any expertise in public health, medicine, or science, but he has a slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” and that’s good enough.

Another word NPR doesn’t use is “conspiracy theorist.” They acknowledge that he has a few wacky ideas, but hey, he wants to stop the chronic disease epidemic in the USA, isn’t that a good thing?

Kennedy’s baseless claims have included that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain”; that school shootings are attributable to antidepressants; that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender; and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV. He’s also long said that vaccines cause autism and fail to protect people from diseases.

NPR never questions whether Kennedy’s policies would actually work, or for that matter, what his policies are. We’ve got a real health problem — obesity, diabetes, narcotics, etc. — but they don’t address his solutions, if any. What he has done is tap into MAGA paranoia.

He knit together an unlikely coalition — some from the left and some MAGA supporters — eager to take on the establishment.

“Bobby Kennedy and Trump have bonded over tying the core of MAGA — which is a distrust of institutions and getting corruption out of institutions — to our health care industries,” says Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy and the Trump transition team, who spoke with NPR before Kennedy’s nomination.

What corruption? Be specific. The corruption I see is that there are an awful lot of quacks getting rich writing pop-sci diet books, and pharma MBAs leading their companies to immense profits at the cost of every day Americans’ health. You’re not going to fix that by hounding doctors and scientists and imposing bogus health treatments on the public.

By the way, Calley Means is a Harvard MBA with connections to the Heritage Foundation but no medical background who wrote pop-sci book about nutrition. I imagine that RFK Jr has the “wrote a book about dieting” demographic solidly locked up.

Means — himself a former lobbyist for the food and drug industry — has emerged as one of the leading voices in the MAHA orbit. He and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, catapulted into the political sphere after publishing a bestseller on metabolic health. Both have business ventures in the health and wellness industry.

But have no fear! Means and RFK Jr have a simple plan to fix everything.

Means says a key to their plan is eliminating conflicts of interest.

See above reference to Means’ own interests.

When the article does cite critics of RFK Jr, it’s always with qualifications and padding, and never goes into much depth.

“There are some things that RFK Jr. gets right,” says former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden. “We do have a chronic disease crisis in this country, but we need to avoid simplistic solutions and stick with the science.”

Great — we have a “chronic disease crisis,” but what’s the solution? It never says. Is it “drink raw milk” (Kennedy has endorsed that)? Is it “end all vaccinations” (he thinks they cause autism, and change children’s gender identity)? Is it “tear down cell phone towers” (he thinks 5G is used for mind control)? Is it “take anti-depressants off the market” (he claims they cause mass shootings)? Is it “replace COVID vaccines with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine” (he thinks those are effective)? Or maybe it would help to insert more racism in science policy.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he continued, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

Reading NPR’s article, you might come away with the impression that Kennedy is a grounded, qualified person trying to fix a real problem in how we let pharmaceutical companies run rampant — which I think is a genuine issue that resonates with the public — but it completely neglects to point out that Kennedy is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who will make everything worse. But that’s NPR for you.

If you’d like a more accurate perspective on the consequences of Kennedy running the bioscientific and medical establishment, read Science magazine.

Public health researchers are alarmed, especially given Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines. “I can’t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told CNN.

Numerous critics of Kennedy have weighed in with concerns. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine expert Paul Offit told CNN Kennedy is a “science denialist.” Even Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during Trump’s presidency, said at a meeting this week that if Kennedy discourages people from getting vaccines, “I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health,” economy, and security.

“We’re all in a state of panic,” this person added. “The damage that he can do is enormous. I don’t know anybody who isn’t worried about this.”

But then, Science isn’t in the business of spooning comforting pablum into the mouths of the well-off.