"They're Mental Degenerates; I'm Entirely Normal," Plus

Sickness at the CDC, plus music

Firefighter slogging through the aftermath of a car gone off the track (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

I am reader-supported in all manner of ways; if you’ve not already subscribed, please consider doing so today.

“They’re Mental Degenerates; I’m Entirely Normal”

Returning once again to the pages of The Washington Post, the managers of which are dissociating at an accelerating pace, I found an op-ed by Sohrab Ahmari, a former opinion editor at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, subtitled “Even a populist presidency can’t stop the online right’s slide into irrationality.”

Amari begins by distancing himself and other presumably reasonable right-wing pundits by identifying a breed of conspiracist once only found frequenting the late-night AM airwaves that a friend of his dubbed “star child radio,” after the David Ickes-style fantasists who blamed much of the world’s ills on conflict between rival alien factions or between aliens and people in the know.

Haha, look at those freaks, they’re nothing like you and me.

By way of example he cites a writer, Michael Shellenberger, he once published at The Post and describes as a former environmental activist.

A green insider criticizing his own movement is catnip to conservative publications (lefty outlets equally relish publishing the right’s internal critics.) What made Shellenberger especially attractive was how sensible he seemed. He didn’t deny man-made climate change. Rather, he marshaled fact and reason to show that it’s a “manageable” crisis, not a warrant for undoing industrial civilization.

The paper continued to publish Shellenberger after I left in 2021. Expanding his range, he took on Big Tech censorship as well as the crime that disfigured many blue cities; he even made a quixotic bid for governor of California. He became more explicitly identified with the right in the bargain. That, too, was a reasonable response to the left’s race-rioting and pandemic authoritarianism in those febrile years.

Shellenberger, though, is far from “a green insider;” he was instead an advocate for nuclear power stations and fracking, the latter presumably on behalf of the fossil fuel borg’s ongoing attempt to portray natural gas as “clean.” Nowhere can you find him, even before what Amari describes as a descent into madness, supporting the conversion from nuclear, coal, oil and gas to renewable energy.

This is to say that Shellenberger’s starting point was a place similar to where Amari begins his column and continues it with his description of his example—whitewashing a position that sounds reasonable but is in fact already extreme.

Shellenberger is now, not coincidentally, a professor at Bari Weiss’s University of Austin, lecturing from an endowed chair on “Politics, Censorship and Free Speech,” and a columnist at Weiss’s Free Press. Amari doesn’t mention this, probably because the degree of difficulty in painting an acknowledged employee of the freshly-crowned editor in chief at CBS News as beyond the pale exceeds the limits of polemical physics.

Amari goes on to distance the regime and its father from the craziest of Trump supporters who are, let us remember, among the crowd who tried to sabotage the presidential transition and wanted to hang the vice president who wouldn’t cooperate with them, and who have to a person been pardoned by daddy.

For many of his most ardent supporters on the online right, one of President Donald Trump’s greatest appeals was his non-interventionism and professed desire for world peace. Yet so far, Trump II hasn’t strayed from the expansive vision that characterized post-Cold War U.S. strategy: The president backs Israel so staunchly that he deployed the U.S. military to join Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program; with Ukraine-Russia negotiations stalled, he now envisions Kyiv retaking all its lost territory. The likely explanation for this is that Trump is far more beholden to the traditional GOP agenda, especially rock-solid support for the Jewish state, than his online fans imagined. That might be too painful to admit. Enter star-child radio: What if things aren’t going well for us because they are assassinating dissidents such as Kirk? What if they have a mountain of kompromat material with which they blackmail Trump? What if they did 9/11? What if they control our minds through the occult?

Whatever the cause — an epistemic disaster of this scale has many fathers — the potential effect is alarming. This media system promotes mental degeneration and a sense of learned helplessness that can only yield destructive politics. People convinced that an amorphous they controls events are unlikely to take political responsibility for the shape of our common life — and far more likely to fall in thrall to demagogues and dictators.

The “potential effect”—good lord, man! “Mental degeneration” is a fucking job requirement in the regime, from the convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender atop it, to white supremacist Stephen Miller, to Christian nationalist Russell Vought, to the alcoholic wife-beater Whisky Pete at the war department, to the heroin-ravaged and steroid-raddled and worm-brained mutant Kennedy at health and human services, to the pedophile protectionist Linda McMahon at education and on down the line.

You simply cannot get a significant job with these people if you’re not some kind of bona fide freak.

I’ll allow as how Trump does indeed not stray far from what had previously been a mostly unspoken traditional post-war “GOP agenda” going back to the halcyon days of Nixon, which is to exclude anyone but reactionary white men from deciding the course of the nation, to expand the already vast powers of the presidency and subjugate the other branches of government, and to prevent people of color from voting or, if they do get past the barricades, from having an impact on elections.

(People like Amari might laud Bill Buckley for kicking the Birchers out of the conservative movement in 1961, but even hagiographic accounts of the affair acknowledge that all he really did was pressure them into adopting some public manners and a better fashion sense. And they did for a while, as witness when Ronald Reagan brought them into the White House, but they don’t have to anymore.)

And that closing line! The entire GOP establishment, as represented by reactionary media and Republican federal legislators, are in thrall to demagogues and wanna-be dictators, and in fact are mostly demagogues themselves, while the regime routinely and viciously attack those relatively few among the reactionary crowd who have ventured a half-step or more out of line.

Parenthetically, only without parentheses because I used them so near here, one has to think that Amari has personal beef with Shellenberger—or maybe Shellenberger’s employer Bari Weiss—to single him out as representative of right-wing ding-dong crazies when he’s so clearly in solid with the mainstream and will probably be doing hits on CBS News in the not-distant future.

Sickness at the CDC

I was whining a few days ago about my inability to afford a subscription to the online medical news and opinion magazine STAT, which I like because it collects just a treasure trove of material about the science and social impact of medicine all in one place. As the organization has grown more successful, their increasing willingness to paywall their work has made them less accessible.

They did nevertheless run a story on Saturday outside the paywall about the latest shutdown-driven firings at the CDC—and I will once again note that senate Republicans could end the shutdown in a minute by killing the filibuster—which illustrates why I like the joint so much.

Overall, the White House is expected to cut between 1,100 and 1,200 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, though it’s not yet clear how many will come from the CDC. HHS hasn’t released official numbers on the cuts, but most anecdotal reports related to health agency firings have centered around the CDC.
. . .
The terminations came after President Trump made good on threats to axe federal workers as the government shutdown drags into a third week. Trump has blamed the shutdown on congressional Democrats and has pledged at the White House in the past few days that these firings, which are not typical for a government shutdown, would hit “Democrat” programs.

One high-ranking CDC official who just lost their job disputed characterizations of the cuts as the natural consequence of a shutdown, instead calling it the weaponization of one.

“The executive branch is using the shutdown as cover for an intentional and targeted dismantling of leadership across the agency. It’s designed to sow chaos, demoralize career staff, and cripple the federal scientific infrastructure that protects Americans’ health,” the official told STAT. “Calling this a budget issue is a lie. It’s an abuse of power — unethical, unlawful, and profoundly dangerous.”
. . .
The nation’s top health agency has weathered the ousting of Susan Monarez 29 days into her tenure as CDC director, only weeks after a gunman fired 500 bullets at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters, killing a police officer and shaking staff members facing unprecedented policy changes as well as fears about the politicization of public health. Just days after the shooting, the government fired over 150 violence and injury prevention specialists at the CDC Center for Injury Prevention. And the firings on Friday affected the Office of Safety, Security and Asset Management, which is responsible for agency security.

Kennedy and the rest of HHS’s top managers pretty much ignored the assault on CDC headquarters, and while that’s par for attacks on people the regime (and its predecessors) don’t view as important, or sometimes even as people, firing a large proportion of the staff charged with keeping CDC employees safe seems like a very pointed message, as does the earlier firing of Injury Prevention employees, who among other things focus on the tracking and prevention of firearms violence, in the wake of the Atlanta attack.

As I said this past Friday when I mentioned my lust for STAT, you can find other sources for a lot of what they report. What you won’t find is a constellation of stories covering every angle of something like the CDC firings, written by reporters who have spent in some instances decades cultivating sources inside the federal agencies relevant to their expertise, and prominent treatment of other stories that may be scientifically or socially significant but not of enough interest to mass-market publications to warrant prominent, in-depth coverage. So you have to look at the STAT headlines and then go searching for stories in other publications, most of which will be written by people who have more casual connections with their sources and the material.

The CDC firings and the Republican refusal to end the shutdown so long as it provides useful cover for their depredations—which include the arbitrary firings and rehirings that serve to further Russell Vought’s goal of traumatizing all federal employees, whether or not they’re among the ones the regime want to keep—reinforce my conviction that we are long-term fucked. So I was surprised to see a somewhat Pollyannish piece yesterday morning from Robert Reich.

Across the land, average Americans are realizing that they too could be dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night by Trump’s ICE agents, or tear-gassed and arrested by Trump’s National Guard, or targeted by Trump’s prosecutors, or shot by Trump’s military.

The Big Reveal is that all of us are now endangered.

Multiple polls show Trump’s approval tanking, but I think it runs deeper than this.

Something dramatic has happened over the last two weeks — as America sees more vividly than ever who Trump is, where he and his trio of lapdogs (Miller, Vought, and Vance) want to take the country, and how we’re all potential targets.

The Big Reveal is impossible not to see. Trump and his lapdogs are doing all of this completely in the open. They have no shame.

Most Americans abhor what they see, because what they see is abhorrent.

This is how the great sleeping giant of America awakens, roars, and puts an end to it.

What first struck me was Reich’s reference to Trump’s polling, which I had written about last week. The numbers at that time weren’t that bad, showing Trump nine points under water in the RealClear Polling average—the same one Reich uses—with favorable/unfavorable numbers at 44%/53%. How much worse, I wondered, could it have gotten in a week?

The answer is “not at all;” in fact the numbers are a tad better, with the favorable/unfavorable average for the two weeks ending on October 9 showing at 45.3%/51.9%.

Those numbers cover a period in which the regime continued to murder people on the high seas and issued the national security memo making broad categories of free speech susceptible to criminalization. They cover the period when hundreds of heavily armed, masked regime thugs, overseen in person by one of our contemporary hydra-Himmler heads, Kristi Noem, raided a Chicago apartment complex and threw US citizens along with legal residents and undocumented immigrants, including children, zip-tied and naked into the streets before dawn.

And then Noem turned the events into a music video with the help of footage from NewsNation, the reactionary cable “news” outlet she invited to document the raid. NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media, who along with Sinclair Broadcasting helped propel the short-lived exile from the airwaves of Jimmy Kimmel.

And yet the numbers are fine, really. They’re no worse than what Biden suffered for most of his last three years, or what Trump’s numbers in his first term looked like much of the time. To suggest that they signify some sort of vast and, more important, potent awakening beyond the borders of already-woke terrain seems delusional. Even if you expect to see the midterm elections go off without a hitch, Democrats at the same polling aggregator Reich cited enjoy only a two-point margin over Republicans in generic congressional polls over the same period.

Reich isn’t delusional, though, so I guess this is just a morale-building exercise. What has me down is that even if we manage what we laughably consider free and fair elections next year, even if we get a veto-proof majority of Democratic legislators which excludes or marginalizes Vichy Democrats and creatures of capital, even if the regime decide to abide by legislation congress passes, it would take decades of consistent, uninterrupted effort and spending to restore the institutional memory and expertise that the regime have wrecked in just their first nine months of savaging the civil service.

Making matters more difficult is the apparent addiction of even sensible Democrats to the notion that Republicans will awaken as if from a speedball-fueled mania to support full bore initiatives combating global warming and building a sane social welfare system, for two instances. Never mind restoring voting rights and abortion rights in the face of a high court determined to thwart those goals and desperately in need of a good packing. and no sympathetic president to pack it.

There’s nowhere to run, ultimately, but I just want to run.

A personal note

I’ve been feeling persistently unwell for a couple of weeks now, and the regimen I was trying to establish—walks before dawn, writing for three or four hours on return and then publishing at 4PM or 5PM Eastern, which is 10AM or 11AM my time—has collapsed. This turns out to be sort of a good thing. I wasn’t happy with the quality of the writing, and the self-inflicted pressure to maintain an arbitrary deadline wasn’t doing anything good for my mental health, so I decided to dial down the heat a bit.

Consequently this piece and the one that went up yesterday were the result of maybe six or seven (or eight) hours of reading and writing, and to me at least they seem much less choppy and more coherent, and I feel a lot better about them. The downside of taking that amount of time is that I can’t do it every day. I just have too many medical appointments and other obligations to get that much uninterrupted head space on a daily basis.

This is to say that although I will be publishing something every weekday, it won’t always be as long or liquid as what I’m capable of on a good day.

Still, I hope that if you’ve not already subscribed you’ll consider doing so now.

Music

I would seriously enjoy taking George Clinton to see this first band, even though the drum part on this tune is at times more self-indulgent than I prefer.
Jazz Avengers, “No. 1 J-Funk”

Dave Alvin, “Highway 61 Revisited”

Roy Orbison, “Go! Go! Go! (Down the Line)”

Ry Cooder, “The Prodigal Son”

Rev. Peyton’s Big Damn Band, “Ways and Means”

Howlin’ Wolf, Smokestack Lightning”

Eric Gales, “Smokestack Lightning”

Booker T. & The MG’s, “Time is Tight”

Amy Winehouse, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”

Thunderpussy, “Thunderpussy”

The White Stripes, “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”

Doja Cat, “Paint the Town Red”

Prince, “Whole Lotta Love”

And that, Comrades in Whatever, is all I got. Be well, take care, subscribe if you’ve not and you’re feeling supportive.