Democrats seized on Musk’s involvement in the race to energize voters who were upset about the wrecking ball he and his unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, have taken to federal agencies. They raised the stakes of an already high-stakes contest by holding out Wisconsin as a test case for Musk, saying that if he succeeded, he would take his model across the country.
Elon Musk has enormous wealth and power, and he is using both to destroy America. At the moment, however, he can't avoid repudiation at the ballot box, at least in some places. Wisconsin – where he spent $20 million to try to replace a (somewhat) liberal state Supreme Court judge with a Trumpist – is one of them. The state's voters told him to get lost.
That is very, very good news at a time when we need it. So, in their own way, were the results in two Florida House elections to fill vacated seats in overwhelmingly Republican districts. The Republicans won, but the Democratic candidates considerably narrowed the 2024 margins. I wonder how much closer they could have made it by focusing their campaigns against Musk.
This would all be pointing toward an overwhelming Democratic congressional takeover in the 2026 elections, except for one thing: Trump and his Republican toadies are working overtime to ensure that next year's balloting will be rigged to ensure their party's victory. Trump's BS "executive order" to disenfranchise millions of people (he can't do that) points to their plans to use every tactic, legal or not, to make sure that they remain in power no matter what the voters want.
The Democrats – and the people – need to get fired up to stop the scheme. Positive developments like these could be a catalyst.
The likeliest explanation for wrecking public health
In a post on LinkedIn, former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said, “The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed.” Califf told CNN on Tuesday that “If we let down our guard and don’t do a good job reviewing, we’re going to unleash some things that are really dangerous into the population. Unless there’s some super plan, there’s going to be an effect on safety, because it takes whole teams of people to monitor safety of products, and the timetables for product review will probably be delayed.”
As this report and countless others like it make clear, the Trump regime is gutting federal public health agencies, and yanking promised funding away from state and local health programs. The blatantly lies from vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the apparatchik in charge of this figurative (and soon-to-be real) bloodletting, require us to reach the obvious conclusion: The goal is for more people sicken and die.
This was the plain-as-day policy in 2020, when in the early months of the covid pandemic Trump and his first team of destroyers had policies that amounted to "Let it spread as far and wide as possible." They denied any such motives, of course, but when a policy has an easily predictable result, that result was the goal no matter what words came along with it.
I'm not going to defend the Food and Drug Administration as some kind of perfect regulator. It has a long record of problems, and has not always acted in the public's best interests, serving too often as a water carrier for Big Pharma and Big Food. Likewise, other public-health agencies have far from perfect records. But at their core, they have been filled with experts who want to do the right thing.
Kennedy's vows to excise corruption and malfeasance would be heartening if there was any sign that he wanted reform rather than wrecking the beneficial parts of what these agencies do along with the bad stuff. But when someone who denies the long-clear benefits of vaccines is in charge – someone who is blatantly fine with watching children die in order to push this rancid ant-science – there is zero reason to believe that reform will occur. It's just destruction, all the way down.
I don't believe for a second that this is a misguided but well-meaning plan. Sickness and death will expand in Trump's America, because that is the inevitable result of what's going on now.
[D]uring his time as Josef Stalin’s favorite scientist, Lysenko and his version of biology that came to be known as Lysenkoism led to the persecution of biologists who stuck to science-based views regarding agriculture that conflicted with Lysenko’s, up to and including imprisonment and, even in some cases, execution. Worse, his ideas applied to Soviet Agriculture led to crop shortfalls and worsened famines, to the point where Although no one has been imprisoned or executed yet, under the reign of President Donald Trump and HHS Secretary RFK Jr., the suppression of politically incorrect science and purges of the ideologically impure or suspect have already begun, most recently Peter Marks, the FDA’s Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), who was forced to resign last week.
History brings context. And this piece from the Science-Based Medicine blog provides some vital context to understand the Trump regime's attacks on honest science in general and, as the wave of firings at the Department of Health and Human Services shows, public health in particular.
The author is careful, and his post is full of details, as he explains how despots don't tolerate views that are contrary to their ideologies or assumptions. His goal is to show us, in his words, "what happens when an ideological scientific crank becomes very powerful." It's bad news.
This kind of thing is happening throughout the regime. It was prominent the first time Trump was in the White House, when, for example, a notoriously weird economist named Peter Navarro pushed wacko policies regarding China and trade. Now Navarro is a senior apparatchik, flogging the regime's wildly counterproductive – that is, dangerous to our economic health – tariffs.
Our troubles are just beginning in America, and around the world, and one of the key reasons is that our regime is systematically installing its "favorite" evidence-rejecting ideologues everywhere.
“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”
This story feels like a dismal turning point in the Trump regime. And it's right out of Kafka: As the Atlantic magazine reports, the Trump regime is admitting that its already lawless deportations – to an El Salvador prison notorious for human rights abuses – included a man who was entirely innocent.
So they're going to bring him back home? Not a chance, because you see, it's done and his life is over and no one – definitely no mere federal judge – can do a thing about it.
If you or someone you know got kidnapped off the street and sent to a foreign prison, too bad for you. I'm not saying that is likely, because it isn't. What I'm saying is that under Trump rules, it's possible.
So if you think this kind of thing won't happen to American citizens at some point, you are naive. Every whack at the tree of civil liberties comes closer to bringing it down. Do we ever learn?
"I can no longer be silent or 'professional'. I have so few skills to fight the cancer of fascism that is spreading through the country but as a "data person" – inspired by the work of the BlueSky account USA Disappeared Tracker (https://lnkd.in/gmc8nFNr) – I created a dashboard to track people who are deported, detained or renditioned for political reasons by the Trump Adminstration."
I hate that this brilliant project is needed, but these are the times we're living in. The creator of the project is looking for help in building and maintaining it, and I hope she will be swamped with such assistance.
This newsletter is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money. For more details, please read my About page.
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