Most of us would agree that Trump and his support base are “weird,” in the sense that everything these people stand for: the pathological hatred of immigrants, the rejection of science, the peeling back of human rights, etc. represent giant steps backward into the Dark Ages.
Most people would say that it’s a weird direction to be taken by a large segment of American society. Yet the word doesn’t begin to capture the essence of what we are encountering here.
To call a person or a group “weird” means little else than that they don’t conform to our cultural norms. I may say that my neighbor is weird because he comes outside in his underwear, or that a certain religious cult has weird beliefs.
But what we have here is better described as evil than weird. Did any of the survivors of Hitler or Stalin describe their tormentors as “weird?”
Is this the best we can do to describe pure Trumpism? Is it proper to say that an attempt to overthrow the United States government is weird?
About 40 years ago, I used to lie in bed on Sunday mornings with my coffee and Los Angeles Times opened to the real estate section: “Homes in Other States.” I recall voicing some level of buyer’s remorse, having just paid more for a who-cares house in Southern California, where I could have bought half a county in Oklahoma or Mississippi.
My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, would ask me, “But do you think you’d be happy living in West Virginia, with some of the most poorly-educated people in the country? Do you think that would forward your career and your overall life satisfaction?” She had a point, to be sure.
Today’s MAGA conspiracy theorists will tell you that people are leaving California in droves, because of things like environmental regulations. Yet that doesn’t explain why the Golden State, if it were a country, would have the fourth largest economy on the planet, and a house here identical to one in Alabama whose value there may be $200K would fetch about $1.2 million here.
People don’t come here for the wide-open freeways. We’re here for the beauty, the sophistication of so many people, highly educated people, and unparalleled business opportunities.
There’s a reason that Google, Oracle, Apple, Nvidia, Adobe, Salesforce, Facebook, Visa, Wells Fargo, Disney, etc. aren’t located in Arkansas or Louisiana.
At left we have John Fetterman talking to people so stupid they’ll believe that it would have been wrong for the British colonists to oppose King George III in the late 18th Century, or for the people of Germany and Italy in the 1930s to stand up against Hitler and Mussolini. What about the people in today’s dictatorships, i.e., the people in Russia, China, North Korea, or any of the other 50+ authoritarian regimes around the world?
Morons tend to agree with the loudest, most aggressive voice of nationalism, regardless of how little sense it makes.
It’s a great moment of opportunity for Fetterman.
Seminal astrophysicist Carl Sagan explains why uncomfortable ideas may be banned in religion, they must not be shunned in science.
This is an important concept in American life today, as conspiracy theorists are convinced that climate change denial cannot be considered in scientific circles.
I happened to bring this up in my interview with Dr. V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution, who has been amassing data on global warming since the 1970s. He laughed, and explained, “If I could prove that human activity was not causing temperatures to rise, I’d be be one of the wealthiest and most famous scientists in world history.”
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