"If Trump wants to fight anti-Semitism, great! But do it as part of a broad effort to enforce civil rights laws for everyone, without affording special treatment to anyone, including Jews." In general I agree with this statement -- we should protect civil rights of everyone -- no exceptions. But you miss the context in which the EOs were released. I think that the EOs focusing on Jews alone are justified by the extraordinary level of antisemitism compared to other forms of bigotry and harassment, by skyrocketing of antisemitic hate crimes (both in absolute numbers and relative to other hate crimes), and by the double standard of how the universities and law enforcement address them. The context matters!
I have a small statistical quibble with the following in your article: "but 1.2 million Americans died from Covid, and that number is about 0.4% of the population". The vast majority of people who died from Covid had a pre-existing condition, in particular, obesity and/or diabetes. If someone was in the hospital dying of diabetes and contracted Covid, I believe there was a bias to record the cause of death as Covid. This bias was to support the overblown hysteria (leading to lockdowns and school closures) around a virus that was not terribly dangerous for people in good health. In the scenario above the proximate cause of death was Covid, but the ultimate cause of death was diabetes. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that the cause of death was multi-factor. But do death certificates allow for "multi-factor" as the cause of death?
The reason that the death rate from Covid was higher in the USA than in other countries was because there are so damn many obese and diabetic people in the population. So really the cause of death for all these nominal Covid deaths was junk food.
lol. Can be summarized, “Trump has paused funding for academic and scientific research, removed public data used for research, but who’s to say this is bad? I don’t think it’s that bad.”
Lysenko was finally ousted from his post as president of Soviet agricultural academy the thanks to the letter of 300, signed, among others, by Andrey Sakharov. Would the American Academy of Science and Letters give Lysenko their highest award? Technically, he was censored.
Trump offered up over 10,000 national guard troops to stop J6. Nancy Pelosi, who was the official in charge of capitol security declined those troops. Trump did all that he could to stop it, but was thwarted by Democrats because they wanted J6 to happen. J6 was a set up not an insurrection.
I had about 30 seconds of confused mental processing when I first saw your comment. Then I got it. Call me slow. It happens. I am getting old. But it wins the award for my Substack 2025 (so far), for "highest value comment per word."
Academia has suffered from the same circular bias as has Washington, DC: apply for taxpayer money to fund a program to study a particular belief, write about that beleif and how it is bad and destroying the country, get more taxpayer funding to further confirm and write about that beleif. I hope to god that it comes to an end as it is in DC, it is infinitely shameless.
Think of Trump as a modern day Andrew Jackson. They are both demagogic populists who believe they have/had a mandate from the people to "get things done." But they were not capable of solving the problems they face/d and the way they approached them, did/does not reflect our important values and undermined some of the restraints on chaos in the system. Like Jackson, Trump will do lots of harm, but I think we should all really fear what comes after - both domestically and internationally. Life can be hard and frustrating, even in the richest and most comfortable society the world has ever known. And it can be very appealing to "move fast and break things" or try to fundamentally remake the system, but chaos begets chaos. The people of the US aren't intrinsically any better than those of Sudan or Russia (or our predecessors of the 1840s or the 1930s). What reason is there to believe that within 20 years we cant find ourselves caught up, again, in a civil war or unsustainable optional foreign wars. I don't know what we should do, but I'm pretty sure Trump is not the answer.
it's interesting how we let things slide when it's our side. Do you have to kind of actively deny your own evolution to thwart that? people who succeed, like the author here, are admirable.
Generally, I enjoy your sober, rational analyses. While I agree with your comments about the EO regarding antisemitism, and with your rationale for that, I pretty much disagree with the rest of piece, which I find to be ignoring the obvious. There seems to be some rationalization While the de facto censorship of DEI thinking was harmful to the career and research of some, eroding particularly social science, including some who were attacking, that sort of politically correcting policing by our colleagues is child's play compared to what has already been launched, making public health and disease databases unavailable is probably a harbinger. Past has already proven to be prologue. The previous Trump administration was very hostile to science, as are each ends of the ideological spectrum. However, those four years were not nearly has hostile or damaging as this single move to remove access to public data sets, which is the the government explicitly controlling access to empirically collected data (even if it proves to be temporary). To what end? Instantaneous judgements about quality, waste, imaginary fraud, suppression of findings embarrassing to the government or President? Control of this information is the among the worst forms of government censorship. In Florida, there were explicit, illegal and coercive attempts to the data collected by it own health department including law enforcement intimidation of career scientists about their state-level COVID data, this is relevant since the current US attorney general served in that state's office. The sunset of the clout of our annoying, sanctimonious, administrative and tenured colleagues inspired by DEI is welcome. EO's reversing previous EO's, but now virtually everything is other EO's circumventing established law. That battle with those pests is the last one, the sea change is underway and there is a new, much more ominous threat. I do not seeing free inquiry and science flourshing under a government by executive fiat.
I am confused. You wrote that you disagreed with most of my post. And yet a good hunk of your post is on the bad, censorious nature of removing the data -- and I wrote quite explicitly that I thought that was bad, so I am confused about what you disagree with.
You also wrote about lots of other EOs breaking laws. This post did not address other EOs. However, from what I've seen, the claims of lawbreaking are mostly fearmongering, not actual identification of actual actions that break actual laws. Go here for an example:
scroll up for the original point. My interlocutor then responded with a Vox article supposedly documenting all the broken laws. But when I read it, I again found more fearmongering than evidence of lawbreaking.
And, of course, most Presidents issue policies, proclamations, or EOs that break the law, as did Biden:
I am glad you say we are mostly in agreement on principle. I believe it was Schlesinger's book, the Imperial Presidency on the heels of LBJ and Nixon, was one of the more famous, early warnings about the over-use of EO's. I don't think its fear mongering, what many people are afraid of is already happening, about to happen, or recently tried. Impounding appropriated funds was already attempted, including the attempt to stop all federal research support by EO, and is probably unconstitutional, as it has been found to be previously, as are other reversals of congressional acts by EO. I don't see free inquiry and science thriving in this environment or under what appears to be, at least for the moment, a new system of government. Anyway, far from your original post's points.
On the question of Trump's response to antisemitism. Executive orders are designed to solve specific problems more than to set wider policies. Singling out antisemitism when that is the problem needing a solution is not favoritism, nor does it suggest that discrimination against other groups is unimportant. If we actually had a significant problem with discrimination against Muslims, an EO so directed might be appropriate. That is not the case despite propaganda to the contrary.
A separate question related to free speech and freedom of religion is important here. Speech and religion CAN be infringed when it leads to direct and legitimate threat of harm to others via actions that are on their own illegal. Practitioners of the Aztec religion that requires human sacrifice would find the practice of their religion banned because human sacrifice is illegal. Many of the pro-Palestinian protests cross these lines beyond time, place and manner speech violations by incitement to riot and violence from actors and on behalf of a population that has a track record of acting on these beliefs. That is why their speech is NOT protected and bans on it are not an infringement or threat to the First Amendment. Hope that makes sense.
Lots of good material here which I agree with or at least see as plausible. There are a few things though that might require revisiting. Questioning the 2020 election is protected speech as were the protests at the Capitol. While a small number of people crossed the line by engaging in violent actions, most did not...but many, many, many were persecuted by the Biden Justice Department for simply being present on the site of the demonstrations, a response NOT seen to the largely Democrat protesters burning cities in the name of George Floyd. The reality is that the protesters had valid concerns that have yet to be addressed.
There is no question that many states illegally changed their election procedures under the guise of COVID in ways that compromised election security in a fashion that would favor the political party that assumed control in 2021. My own state was one of these and heightened attention to these issues has already found 2 examples of blatant election misconduct on the level that determined the outcome of these elections in 2024 casting our legislature into crisis. As with the 2020 election...these actions benefited the party of Biden and Harris.
At the presidential level, residents of states with honest elections have every right to question and deny allowing electors of states whose elections fail to meet proper standards because all will have to live under the resulting government. Historically, the confederate states lost their voting rights during the Civil War and Reconstruction for their actions. When Democrats re-corrupted the elections with Jim Crow Laws these states again corrupted their elections. This is why the Voting Rights Act was passed and is enforced on the states at the federal level.
The question of the validity of the 2020 election can only be solved when we can account for the some 8,000,000 votes for Joe Biden that somehow did not get cast for Clinton, Obama or Harris when election procedures were not being systemically corrupted. Occam's razor comes down on the side of the 2020 protesters. Something to think about.
I created a high-quality predictive model that forecast the results of the 1952-2016 presidential elections quite accurately. The discrepancy between the model's forecast for 2020 and the official results are so large that they are likely to occur about once in 20 thousand years. Here is my substack with statistical graphics:
I am disappointed that the author claims to be a free thinker, yet has put beyond debate the questioning of a process (tallying the 2020 election results) that was deliberately hidden from the public.
Hi Lee. I’m confused about your comparisons between the contributions of those (like females) via DEI hiring vs. the contributions of Jewish scientists’ talents. Arlene Walker-Andrews
Hi Arlene! How are you doing? Still provosting? I did not compare the contributions of those hired with/without DEI. I simply pointed out that hiring preferences based on race, religion, ethnicity and sex are illegal. I do believe that many hired or admitted under DEI auspices were done in a manner that violated civil rights law prohibitions against those types of discrimination. Students for Fair Admissions demonstrated that quite conclusively for admissions. Go here for a Berkeley Law Dean advocating/advising to do just this in what would be, in effect, a conspiracy to break California law banning affirmative action:
I’m retired these days. I am (again) on a school board and active in the Montana Association of School Boards. I’ll look again at what you wrote, but as a woman who grew up fighting a constant battle against disparaging comments (think CF) I am a hard sell.
Got it. Discrimination is illegal. Harassment, including sexual harassment, is prohibited by Title IX. All that should be enforced. But ... discrimination is illegal. That includes discrimination for ostensibly benevolent purposes.
On your experiences. For sure. But that was a long time ago. Our current Chair is Diana Sanchez. Doing a damn good job, too.
It was a long time ago but now we’ve got Trump trying to make us great again. And, this may surprise some, a lot of women want bodily autonomy. Our school hallways these days ripple with references to “your body, my choice,” the N words, whispers of ICE.” Kids. I grant, but where do these words and thus bravado come from?
Thank you for thinking out loud! I appreciate your sober assessment. I voted for the guy, mostly regarding dei and antisemitism, but agree that all can result in conservative overreach.
The center can be so boring, but stable. I also am less concerned based on the initial court orders curtailing some of the excesses of the new EOs.
Very well thought out piece. I'd like some more on herd immunity tho. Most certainly there is some benefit, see the era of swine flu where there is enough modern scientific methods to yield some certainty that those previously infected had less severe reinfection and a lower death rate (if I recall correctly).
"If Trump wants to fight anti-Semitism, great! But do it as part of a broad effort to enforce civil rights laws for everyone, without affording special treatment to anyone, including Jews." In general I agree with this statement -- we should protect civil rights of everyone -- no exceptions. But you miss the context in which the EOs were released. I think that the EOs focusing on Jews alone are justified by the extraordinary level of antisemitism compared to other forms of bigotry and harassment, by skyrocketing of antisemitic hate crimes (both in absolute numbers and relative to other hate crimes), and by the double standard of how the universities and law enforcement address them. The context matters!
I have a small statistical quibble with the following in your article: "but 1.2 million Americans died from Covid, and that number is about 0.4% of the population". The vast majority of people who died from Covid had a pre-existing condition, in particular, obesity and/or diabetes. If someone was in the hospital dying of diabetes and contracted Covid, I believe there was a bias to record the cause of death as Covid. This bias was to support the overblown hysteria (leading to lockdowns and school closures) around a virus that was not terribly dangerous for people in good health. In the scenario above the proximate cause of death was Covid, but the ultimate cause of death was diabetes. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that the cause of death was multi-factor. But do death certificates allow for "multi-factor" as the cause of death?
The reason that the death rate from Covid was higher in the USA than in other countries was because there are so damn many obese and diabetic people in the population. So really the cause of death for all these nominal Covid deaths was junk food.
lol. Can be summarized, “Trump has paused funding for academic and scientific research, removed public data used for research, but who’s to say this is bad? I don’t think it’s that bad.”
Lysenko was finally ousted from his post as president of Soviet agricultural academy the thanks to the letter of 300, signed, among others, by Andrey Sakharov. Would the American Academy of Science and Letters give Lysenko their highest award? Technically, he was censored.
Trump offered up over 10,000 national guard troops to stop J6. Nancy Pelosi, who was the official in charge of capitol security declined those troops. Trump did all that he could to stop it, but was thwarted by Democrats because they wanted J6 to happen. J6 was a set up not an insurrection.
I had about 30 seconds of confused mental processing when I first saw your comment. Then I got it. Call me slow. It happens. I am getting old. But it wins the award for my Substack 2025 (so far), for "highest value comment per word."
Damned if I've got it yet. Could you explain?
Academia has suffered from the same circular bias as has Washington, DC: apply for taxpayer money to fund a program to study a particular belief, write about that beleif and how it is bad and destroying the country, get more taxpayer funding to further confirm and write about that beleif. I hope to god that it comes to an end as it is in DC, it is infinitely shameless.
Think of Trump as a modern day Andrew Jackson. They are both demagogic populists who believe they have/had a mandate from the people to "get things done." But they were not capable of solving the problems they face/d and the way they approached them, did/does not reflect our important values and undermined some of the restraints on chaos in the system. Like Jackson, Trump will do lots of harm, but I think we should all really fear what comes after - both domestically and internationally. Life can be hard and frustrating, even in the richest and most comfortable society the world has ever known. And it can be very appealing to "move fast and break things" or try to fundamentally remake the system, but chaos begets chaos. The people of the US aren't intrinsically any better than those of Sudan or Russia (or our predecessors of the 1840s or the 1930s). What reason is there to believe that within 20 years we cant find ourselves caught up, again, in a civil war or unsustainable optional foreign wars. I don't know what we should do, but I'm pretty sure Trump is not the answer.
it's interesting how we let things slide when it's our side. Do you have to kind of actively deny your own evolution to thwart that? people who succeed, like the author here, are admirable.
Generally, I enjoy your sober, rational analyses. While I agree with your comments about the EO regarding antisemitism, and with your rationale for that, I pretty much disagree with the rest of piece, which I find to be ignoring the obvious. There seems to be some rationalization While the de facto censorship of DEI thinking was harmful to the career and research of some, eroding particularly social science, including some who were attacking, that sort of politically correcting policing by our colleagues is child's play compared to what has already been launched, making public health and disease databases unavailable is probably a harbinger. Past has already proven to be prologue. The previous Trump administration was very hostile to science, as are each ends of the ideological spectrum. However, those four years were not nearly has hostile or damaging as this single move to remove access to public data sets, which is the the government explicitly controlling access to empirically collected data (even if it proves to be temporary). To what end? Instantaneous judgements about quality, waste, imaginary fraud, suppression of findings embarrassing to the government or President? Control of this information is the among the worst forms of government censorship. In Florida, there were explicit, illegal and coercive attempts to the data collected by it own health department including law enforcement intimidation of career scientists about their state-level COVID data, this is relevant since the current US attorney general served in that state's office. The sunset of the clout of our annoying, sanctimonious, administrative and tenured colleagues inspired by DEI is welcome. EO's reversing previous EO's, but now virtually everything is other EO's circumventing established law. That battle with those pests is the last one, the sea change is underway and there is a new, much more ominous threat. I do not seeing free inquiry and science flourshing under a government by executive fiat.
Kenneth,
I am confused. You wrote that you disagreed with most of my post. And yet a good hunk of your post is on the bad, censorious nature of removing the data -- and I wrote quite explicitly that I thought that was bad, so I am confused about what you disagree with.
You also wrote about lots of other EOs breaking laws. This post did not address other EOs. However, from what I've seen, the claims of lawbreaking are mostly fearmongering, not actual identification of actual actions that break actual laws. Go here for an example:
https://x.com/PsychRabble/status/1887932630295003294
scroll up for the original point. My interlocutor then responded with a Vox article supposedly documenting all the broken laws. But when I read it, I again found more fearmongering than evidence of lawbreaking.
And, of course, most Presidents issue policies, proclamations, or EOs that break the law, as did Biden:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-program/
I am not saying Presidential lawbreaking is good, only that it is pretty common.
Regardless, that was not what this post was about.
I am glad you say we are mostly in agreement on principle. I believe it was Schlesinger's book, the Imperial Presidency on the heels of LBJ and Nixon, was one of the more famous, early warnings about the over-use of EO's. I don't think its fear mongering, what many people are afraid of is already happening, about to happen, or recently tried. Impounding appropriated funds was already attempted, including the attempt to stop all federal research support by EO, and is probably unconstitutional, as it has been found to be previously, as are other reversals of congressional acts by EO. I don't see free inquiry and science thriving in this environment or under what appears to be, at least for the moment, a new system of government. Anyway, far from your original post's points.
On the question of Trump's response to antisemitism. Executive orders are designed to solve specific problems more than to set wider policies. Singling out antisemitism when that is the problem needing a solution is not favoritism, nor does it suggest that discrimination against other groups is unimportant. If we actually had a significant problem with discrimination against Muslims, an EO so directed might be appropriate. That is not the case despite propaganda to the contrary.
A separate question related to free speech and freedom of religion is important here. Speech and religion CAN be infringed when it leads to direct and legitimate threat of harm to others via actions that are on their own illegal. Practitioners of the Aztec religion that requires human sacrifice would find the practice of their religion banned because human sacrifice is illegal. Many of the pro-Palestinian protests cross these lines beyond time, place and manner speech violations by incitement to riot and violence from actors and on behalf of a population that has a track record of acting on these beliefs. That is why their speech is NOT protected and bans on it are not an infringement or threat to the First Amendment. Hope that makes sense.
Lots of good material here which I agree with or at least see as plausible. There are a few things though that might require revisiting. Questioning the 2020 election is protected speech as were the protests at the Capitol. While a small number of people crossed the line by engaging in violent actions, most did not...but many, many, many were persecuted by the Biden Justice Department for simply being present on the site of the demonstrations, a response NOT seen to the largely Democrat protesters burning cities in the name of George Floyd. The reality is that the protesters had valid concerns that have yet to be addressed.
There is no question that many states illegally changed their election procedures under the guise of COVID in ways that compromised election security in a fashion that would favor the political party that assumed control in 2021. My own state was one of these and heightened attention to these issues has already found 2 examples of blatant election misconduct on the level that determined the outcome of these elections in 2024 casting our legislature into crisis. As with the 2020 election...these actions benefited the party of Biden and Harris.
At the presidential level, residents of states with honest elections have every right to question and deny allowing electors of states whose elections fail to meet proper standards because all will have to live under the resulting government. Historically, the confederate states lost their voting rights during the Civil War and Reconstruction for their actions. When Democrats re-corrupted the elections with Jim Crow Laws these states again corrupted their elections. This is why the Voting Rights Act was passed and is enforced on the states at the federal level.
The question of the validity of the 2020 election can only be solved when we can account for the some 8,000,000 votes for Joe Biden that somehow did not get cast for Clinton, Obama or Harris when election procedures were not being systemically corrupted. Occam's razor comes down on the side of the 2020 protesters. Something to think about.
I created a high-quality predictive model that forecast the results of the 1952-2016 presidential elections quite accurately. The discrepancy between the model's forecast for 2020 and the official results are so large that they are likely to occur about once in 20 thousand years. Here is my substack with statistical graphics:
https://surak.substack.com/p/how-i-know-the-2020-presidential
I am disappointed that the author claims to be a free thinker, yet has put beyond debate the questioning of a process (tallying the 2020 election results) that was deliberately hidden from the public.
Hi Lee. I’m confused about your comparisons between the contributions of those (like females) via DEI hiring vs. the contributions of Jewish scientists’ talents. Arlene Walker-Andrews
Hi Arlene! How are you doing? Still provosting? I did not compare the contributions of those hired with/without DEI. I simply pointed out that hiring preferences based on race, religion, ethnicity and sex are illegal. I do believe that many hired or admitted under DEI auspices were done in a manner that violated civil rights law prohibitions against those types of discrimination. Students for Fair Admissions demonstrated that quite conclusively for admissions. Go here for a Berkeley Law Dean advocating/advising to do just this in what would be, in effect, a conspiracy to break California law banning affirmative action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo2KFYv8348
I’m retired these days. I am (again) on a school board and active in the Montana Association of School Boards. I’ll look again at what you wrote, but as a woman who grew up fighting a constant battle against disparaging comments (think CF) I am a hard sell.
Got it. Discrimination is illegal. Harassment, including sexual harassment, is prohibited by Title IX. All that should be enforced. But ... discrimination is illegal. That includes discrimination for ostensibly benevolent purposes.
On your experiences. For sure. But that was a long time ago. Our current Chair is Diana Sanchez. Doing a damn good job, too.
It was a long time ago but now we’ve got Trump trying to make us great again. And, this may surprise some, a lot of women want bodily autonomy. Our school hallways these days ripple with references to “your body, my choice,” the N words, whispers of ICE.” Kids. I grant, but where do these words and thus bravado come from?
Thank you for thinking out loud! I appreciate your sober assessment. I voted for the guy, mostly regarding dei and antisemitism, but agree that all can result in conservative overreach.
The center can be so boring, but stable. I also am less concerned based on the initial court orders curtailing some of the excesses of the new EOs.
Your perspective is very much appreciated 🙏
This is a good, measured take. I agree with most of it. I'm maybe slightly more anti RFK for HHS though.
BTW, this is my take: https://guidedcivicrevival.substack.com/p/time-for-conservatives-to-trade-the
Very well thought out piece. I'd like some more on herd immunity tho. Most certainly there is some benefit, see the era of swine flu where there is enough modern scientific methods to yield some certainty that those previously infected had less severe reinfection and a lower death rate (if I recall correctly).