They could use ignorance as an excuse the first time, but only those who were too young to see the first term can use it now.

One of the failures of the US media is to continue allowing these voters to hide behind such plausible deniability. They knew what they were asking for and they need to be understood as people who wanted this outcome.

Trump was, and is, very explicit about his hatred of science, research, and the entire left in general. He ran on discrediting anyone who was slightly left leaning. Oh, it’s all fake news, Fauci is a murderer, etc.

So no, they knew, they just didn’t care. Or thought he was lying. Why would you ever vote for someone under the hope they’re lying? I don’t know, but they did. That’s, like, trump defense 101. He’s a liar, and somehow that makes him good? Shh shh shh… don’t question it too much.

Really all Americans want the same things, the things you’ve listed and more. The problem is the republicans would sooner die than give us any of that. In my state, the republicans have spent the last decade systematically destroying public school. You see public school is free, so we can’t have that. They’d rather fuck over hundreds of thousands of children’s futures than give poor people free education. It’s all about fucking over the poor, the black, the gay, the immigrants. Anyone else caught in that line of fire is collateral damage. Oops!

> My understanding is at least a portion of the people who voted for Trump did not vote for reactionary fascism, but for what he publicly said/says he'll stand for: standing up for the little guy against ruling elites, stopping imperialist wars, boosting the economy and giving people the famous "tariff checks", etc.

these people are either rubes, or else they heard the subtle dog whistles that implied other things, and thought the wink wink was for them and not the billionaire class.

The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.

Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.

Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.

Here in France, anecdata from friends working in non-profits. So-called "DEI" is far from a requirement for grants, and depending on the administration may in fact be a factor to get rejected.

That being said, everyone in the associative movement is unanimous that you have to use the words and concepts expected by the administration (however absurd that is related to what you do), and that getting funding has 0 correlation with the actual social benefits of your action but everything to do with the bullshit you write in grants and how friends you are with the decision makers. (this opinion is shared both by people who succeed at getting grants and those who don't)

Yes, but no difficulty to believe it (in an informal Bayesian framework). Also reported interview experiences around the world in the past many years point to the same mentality - questions like "How do you believe you can increase [feeling of acceptance] in the classroom, Professor [of Physics]" (just an example).

The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again.

But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore.

They should not canditate. Let a comedian do it instead, like UK did with Count Binface.

> And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election

The damage the Trump administration is doing/has done is nothing that any future administration can undo. The relationship with NATO members alone is unsalvageable.

Apologies in advance for off-topic but I couldn't help but reading your sentence with the tone of a rapper. Like Deltron 3030 or Aesop rock. I think it would sound great.

If there's a text to speech for rapping I'd really love to insert your sentence.

I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.

You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.

Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage.

> Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

¿Por qué no los dos?

They are making hundreds of millions of dollars on the grift. They seem quite comptent.

Some direct quotes are,

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma.”

That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.

Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".

That is exactly how you end up in this situation.

There are actually malicious people in the world, and many of them like to pretend to be incompetent as a smokescreen.

Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."

It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.

When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.

> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

Depends what you (and they) think their job is.

RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".

Russel Vaught said:

> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."

> There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.

not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.

> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.

you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.

> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?

>Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?

Well, the alternative is to have a competent (debatable..) execution of a rotten ideology...

if those scientists were to raise money from private donors would they find themselves in jail, or their property confiscated to where they couldnt continue research? that is the definition of "freedom of speech".

if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.

Regime is what western countries generally, usually call countries they don't like

When was the last time you heard a change of government as a result of democratic election referred to as “regime change”?

Reddit is overwhelmingly liberal, not leftist.

Liberal isn't leftish. Liberal is your Clinton/Biden types, who are center right on the global political stage. (And only in the weird broken US political scene are they considered left wing).

I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.

I think they don't want to cut funding to math projects or engineering projects. They want to cut funding to research that goes against their politics. Cutting math research because "inequality" keyword is a bad look for them and just gives free ammo to their opposition. If they employed an LLM that wouldn't happen and they could still pursue their political goals.