Category Archives: Random Blogging

About That MRI…

I know it is dangerous to get one’s “news” from Facebook and/or other social media platforms, but I was sufficiently intrigued by a post I came across to do some due diligence–to research its accuracy and check it out. The post in question noted that a drug named Leqembi is used to treat early symptoms of Alzheimers, that it is administered via infusion (often through the back of the hand), and that its use requires monitoring via regular MRIs.

The post ends with “why am I mentioning this? No reason,” a tongue in cheek disavowal of the obvious purpose of sharing the information. As most readers of this post will immediately recognize, the information–if accurate–is a likely explanation of the bruises on the back of Trump’s hand and the recent MRI he has been unable to explain. It is certainly consistent with the mental deterioration everyone outside the MAGA cult has observed.

The results of my (admittedly unscientific) research suggest that the post accurately describes the nature and purpose of Leqembi–  generic name lecanemab. It is described as a drug that “targets amyloid-beta (a protein) in the brain,” and it was developed because medical experts believe that amyloid-beta plaques (otherwise known as clumps in the brain) play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Leqembi binds to these proteins and helps to clear them, slowing the progression of the disease. It isn’t a cure; rather, it’s
considered a “disease-modifying” therapy.

The Alzheimer’s Association describes it as follows: 

Lecanemab (Leqembi®) is an antibody intravenous (IV) infusion therapy that targets and removes beta-amyloid from the brain. It has received traditional approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat early Alzheimer’s disease, including people living with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease who have confirmation of elevated beta-amyloid in the brain. Leqembi lowers beta-amyloid in the brain and reduces cognitive and functional decline in people living with early Alzheimer’s.

Leqembi is administered by intravenous (IV) infusion every two weeks, and regular MRI scans are required.

Before starting treatment, there’s a baseline brain MRI, and during treatment, regular MRIs monitor for abnormal changes in the brain like swelling or bleeding, something that can occur when amyloid is being cleared. The manufacturer advises that additional MRIs be given before the 5th, 7th, and 14th infusions, and additional MRIs may be required if certain symptoms arise–symptoms that include confusion, visual changes, dizziness, edema, and gait problems.

There’s a reason doctors and psychiatrists consider it unethical to diagnose from a distance–absent an actual, in-person medical or psychological examination, there is no way to explain behaviors or symptoms with any certainty. In Trump’s case, his refusal to disclose accurate medical information (or for that matter, accurate financial information, i.e. tax returns) understandably gives rise to speculation that may or may not prove accurate. We should acknowledge that, but it is also obvious that the description of Leqembi–the reasons for prescribing it, the method of its administration, the need for MRIs, and the enumeration of the side effects–are consistent with what anyone looking at this walking (limping?) disaster of an egomaniac can see.

In a sane world, a situation where doctors are treating a president for a condition that clearly and negatively affects decision-making would immediately trigger invocation of the 25th Amendment. In our world, where a delusional president and would-be King surrounded by sycophants, grifters and assorted incompetents, a diagnosis of Alzheimers is just one more reason to dissemble, to cover up, to pretend that “Dear Leader” is hale and hearty.

The King isn’t naked, he’s wearing beautiful clothes.

This is unlikely to end well….

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The Aftermath

Those of us outside the MAGA cult see Trump’s steady deterioration. Granted, he’s always been mentally ill, intellectually deficient,  massively ignorant, and a purveyor of ugly rhetoric, but his daily descent–both mental and physical– from even that very low bar is impossible to miss.

So what happens when he’s gone? What happens when the cult loses its Jim Jones?

In an essay in Lincoln Square, Rick Wilson revisits the aftermaths of other strongman regimes, and makes several predictions. (My favorite: an aside suggesting the inevitability of his grave becoming “the largest public all-gender restroom in history.”) Snark aside, Wilson notes that the public discussion has yet to address the chaos and bloodshed that so frequently comes after the collapse of systems built around a single man. As he warns, that’s when a supposedly unified movement turns into a feeding frenzy among the sycophants who have been rewarded not for competence but for “fealty, loyalty, public and private obeisance.”

Autocrats are very good at seizing power and holding it. They are very bad at leaving it behind without blowing something up on the way out. Political scientists have long argued that personality cult regimes are especially fragile at succession because the leader spends his life eliminating rivals rather than training successors.

Wilson points to a long succession of cult figures, beginning with Nero and extending through Mussolini, Stalin and Mao. The more a system is in thrall to one man,” the less prepared it is for the day that man disappears. “The court that spent years flattering him is suddenly full of men who see an empty chair they crave beyond words and reason.”

Franco’s Spain. Romania’s Ceausescus. Libya’s Ghaddafi. Dozens of cases exist in the modern era, including, of course, the Austrian Guy. Some age out. Some lose wars.

In each case, the same thing happened. The autocrat spent his life telling the country that he alone embodied the nation. He hollowed out institutions, punished independent power centers, and promoted flatterers over equals. When he left the stage, he did not leave behind a constitutional order; he left behind a mob of ambitious men in the same room.

If you zoom out, scholarship on personality cults and personalist regimes boils it down to a few core truths, and in the age where Trump is dying before our eyes, we’d better get ready to watch them play out…and exploit the chaos to slap autocracy back into its hole.

Wilson tells us that the more central the person has become, the more dangerous the aftermath. He describes three possibilities: the movement may fracture into rival factions (in which case, he predicts a Vance/Cruz/Rubio/DeSantis knife fight); the cult converts into a dynasty (Donald Jr. is already ramping up–as Wilson says, “you don’t think the Trumps are giving up all this money, do you?”); or the movement is forced into a larger “transition” because it’s too weak to carry on without its human idol.

Donald Trump has spent almost a decade turning the Republican Party from a political party into a cult. The party platform literally dissolved into “whatever Trump says.” Candidates run on loyalty to him more than any coherent ideology. The conservative media ecosystem revolves around his moods, his grudges, and his need for constant adoration. If that is not a proto-cult, it is a full-dress rehearsal.

Wilson says the sycophants who aspire to follow Trump come in three factions: the zealots who picture Trump as some kind of quasi-religious figure, and who won’t move past him will be the core of Don Jr’s 2028 campaign. Then there are the courtiers– the family, money men, and figures like JD Vance who’ve been cultivating their ties to billionaires and Silicon Valley reactionaries, who claim to be the only people who can keep the base and the money together. Finally, there are post-Trump aspirants like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz.

Wilson’s conclusion? “When Trump finally fails to answer the bell, either politically or biologically, do not expect a solemn passing of the torch. Expect the Roman script with better lighting and worse hair.” There will be competing Right wing factions fighting for the same base, scapegoating and accusing each other of treachery (a la Mao’s “Gang of Four”). And he predicts “historical rewrites that would make a Soviet propagandist blush.”

Bottom line: MAGA won’t disappear when Trump does.

The energy that once ran vertically, from base to Leader, will start to run horizontally, between camps and claimants. That is where movements get creative, and reckless, and violent.

You really need to click through and read the whole essay.

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Heritage, Again

As Trump continues to disintegrate before our eyes, and special elections confirm what the polls have been telling us, I think Americans can begin to breathe again. Granted, this evil and incompetent administration will continue to wreak havoc for three more years, but there’s reason to believe that the midterms will put a halt to much of the destruction, and that the political pendulum will swing back from Trump’s gulag to support of something more closely resembling the America we thought we inhabited.

What happens then, however, will depend upon what we’ve learned from this horrifying episode. What rot within the body politic allowed the ascent of people so morally and intellectually unfit for public office? I think there are three interrelated answers to that question. An unfair, “gilded age” economy and a fragmented, politicised media landscape have combined to facilitate the re-emergence of bigotries that had been suppressed but obviously not eliminated.

Research has confirmed that the single most potent predictor of support for MAGA and Trump is racial resentment. But racism is almost always accompanied by other hatreds: of women, of Jews, of Muslims, of immigrants (at least those with Black or Brown skin). Those attitudes haven’t just been fostered and encouraged by “Christian” nationalist churches, publications and social media posts, but also by (mis-named) think tanks. The election of America’s first Black President lit the flame of the rancid ideology they had carefully nurtured during more civil times.

And that brings me to the Heritage Foundation.

With the publication of Project 2025, Heritage shed its disguise as a research institution, and identified itself as a purely ideological enterprise, intent upon remaking American society into one dominated by White Christian males. Minorities aren’t the only elements of the population who would lose status should its fever dream be realized–women would be returned to subservient status too.

The Atlantic has recently documented Heritage’s misogyny. As the article noted, Heritage’s current unmasking may have begun with Kevin Roberts’ defense of anti-Semitism, but disclosure of the nature of the “Heritage” it is trying to protect includes the recent decision to hire Scott Yenor to lead its Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. The author says the choice “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”

In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Yenor labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He frequently uses the term AWFLs (short for “affluent white female liberals”). He was ejected from a position as chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when even Florida’s MAGA Republican-controlled state Senate wouldn’t confirm him.

Yenor believes that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women in the workplace, and has advocated for legal changes that would allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, denying women jobs solely on the basis of their sex or paying men more for performing the same job as women. He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

Yenor’s ideas are rather obviously outside both the American and conservative mainstreams–and not just his opinions on employment discrimination. He has also dismissed women’s suffrage as “a feat of social engineering.” Feminism, he has asserted, weakens the all-important institution of marriage–a situation that calls out for policy change.

So Heritage now faces an uncomfortable question: Does it agree with its new director of American studies?

What makes the question particularly pressing is Heritage’s “one voice” policy. “While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view,” the institution explains, “Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.” If this is Yenor’s view, and he’s now a Heritage director, does that make it Heritage’s official view?

Heritage was founded in 1973 by Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Joseph Coors, and Paul Weyrich. Despite the obvious political ambitions of those founders, until very recently the media has portrayed it as a legitimate, albeit Right-wing, think tank. And that brings me to the role played by the media in MAGA’s capture of our government.

One of the thorniest problems we will face as we try to repair the systemic flaws that allowed bigotry and misogyny to drive  political behavior will be what to do about a media landscape that abets false equivalences–a landscape that allows Americans to avoid “inconvenient” realities and  choose “news” that confirms their biases.

I have no idea what we do about that.

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Our New Digital Reality

Transparency can be so inconvenient.

Elon Musk’s X recently added a new feature that–among other things– allowed users to see where an individual poster was located. Guess what? A huge number of those supposedly “real Americans” turned out to be what we might delicately call “foreign agitators.”

As Lincoln Square (among many others) has reported,

MAGA is not just a political movement of goateed, 50-ish white dudes who all rock that same avatar of them copping what they imagine is an expression of manly vigor in the front seat of their behind-on-the-payments Ford F-350.

It’s a delivery system.

A supply chain for chaos that starts in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing, runs through bot farms in industrial parks outside St. Petersburg or the Pardis Technology Park north of Tehran, or some Nigerian click farm, or a Chinese-criminal-owned social media and tech scam prison in the wilds of Burma, bounces off a rage-merchant influencer “from Ohio” who has never set foot in America, and ends up in your pissed off MAGA uncle’s Facebook feed as a “patriotic truth.”

What conclusions can we draw-should we draw–from the revelation that, as the linked article says, “a bunch of ‘red-blooded American MAGA patriots’ were not American at all. Why would posters from places like Russia, Nigeria, Iran, India, Thailand, and Eastern Europe be cosplaying as neighbors and “real Americans” who were patriotic MAGA partisans?”

It turns out that a significant percentage of MAGA’s online “grassroots” is AstroTurf shipped from overseas. The multiple accounts that make a fringe movement feel much bigger isn’t composed of real people exchanging real attitudes and beliefs. Instead, it’s thousands of fake ones, formed to promote divisive and polarizing content and turn Americans against each other.

Researchers have been documenting this fake MAGA ecosystem for years: foreign accounts that become amplifiers of actual American MAGA propagandists, plus engagement farms, plus MAGA-centric media outlets who either don’t know or don’t care they’re serving as useful idiots. This Twitter reveal was just the icing on the cake.

These aren’t random trolls freelancing for clicks. The U.S. government (until Trump’s second term, of course) has repeatedly disrupted Russian-directed influence networks aimed at American politics, including domain seizures and sanctions for coordinated malign-influence campaigns.

It turns out that our “techie” world has changed the nature of warfare. In the Ukraine war, battles are fought with drones; in today’s version of the Cold War, Russia and other countries with grievances against America don’t need to fire bullets or endanger their soldiers. Instead, they can use tweets to set one American against others, to disrupt the political environment, to encourage enmity. They can turn Americans against each other, with a minimal financial investment and no need to buy weapons of war. As the article quite accurately points out, “social media is a perfect asymmetric weapon; nations that could never take on America in hard power use the addiction of social media that defines our entire culture to hack our politics, our society, and our brains.”

And why does this work? Why do their domestic American targets fall for the tactic?

Because MAGA’s media ecosystem is already pre-programmed for foreign capture, give it a big, loud, dumb narrative that says American liberals eat babies, the U.S. is a decadent and failing experiment, democracy is fake, all the most lurid conspiracies are real, liberalism is a disease, and strongmen should rule. The whole machine lights up like a Christmas tree….

The Kremlin doesn’t need to invade America to build a Ministry of Propaganda; it buys it cheap, drop-ships it here, and MAGA sells it in bulk.

And the foreign architecture of amplification is at its very center. Every time a MAGA influencer runs a pro-Russia theme, or anything else that deepens the engineered political and social divides in America, these foreign engagement networks show up like a flash mob.

The posts spike. The replies swarm. A million clicks and likes make the MAGA faithful feel like they’re in the biggest, baddest tribe.

What’s most infuriating is that the tech bros could stop this, but they’ve chosen not to.

Independent reporting has documented this activity, and Meta, YouTube, and the others have promised to address it. They haven’t. As we know, the social media business model is engagement, and engagement comes from outrage. If that outrage is manufactured by foreign propaganda, well…it still works. So, as the article concludes, “MAGA gets a firehose of artificial oxygen from abroad, and Silicon Valley stands there with its hands in its pockets.”

Once Trump is gone, we have our work cut out for us.

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Heritage’s History

Those of us who know about Project 2025–and were properly horrified by it–also know that those 900+ pages attacking everything that makes America America was a product of the Heritage Foundation. (Now we know just what sort of “heritage” that organization was created to protect.)

Earlier this month, Paul Krugman traced the Foundation’s history, in a newsletter he titled “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation.”

Krugman began with the “fall” part– the recent controversy triggered by the response of Keven Roberts, Heritage’s president, to Tucker Carlson’s interview of rabid neo-Nazi and anti-Semite, Nick Fuentes. In a video, Roberts defended Carlson and attributed the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase that–as Krugman notes–is routinely used to attack Jews.

Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.

Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.

According to Krugman, Heritage has always been a fraud rather than a genuine think-tank,  “a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution.” Its problem now is that its “original scam” was designed for a different time. Back in the Reagan years the Right’s bigotry and intolerance were far more discreet; those prejudices were more subtly employed to elect Republicans who could then be counted on to deliver deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was there to lend superficial respectability to policies that were regressive and discriminatory, and that overwhelmingly benefitted the rich.

Krugman writes that he first encountered Heritage when the organization was working for repeal of the Estate tax, arguing that the tax was a “massive burden on small businesses and farms, which was simply a lie.”

In 2004 only around 300 small businesses and farms owed any estate tax at all. No, I’m not missing zeroes. And the number has gone down over time. These days basically no small businesses or farms pay the tax.

So Heritage wasn’t doing research. It was just pumping out dishonest propaganda.

Krugman cited another example, this one from 2011, the year Heritage released widely ridiculed projections about the positive effects we might expect of Paul Ryan’s budget proposals–again, producing propaganda rather than economic research.

But telling lies on behalf of the wealthy isn’t enough in the MAGA era. To be a right-winger in good standing you also have to be a sexist, a racist, and an anti-Semite, while promoting QAnon and other conspiracy theories.

Krugman cites the “economists” employed by Heritage as examples of its true purpose. In 2014. it was Stephen Moore, a fixture in right-wing circles, who mainstream economists describe as utterly incompetent.  He was replaced by E.J. Antoni, who Trump tried to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Antoni’s nomination was withdrawn after reports surfaced that his Twitter account was filled with “sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump.” (CNN also reported that Antoni “repeatedly tweeted that liberal economist Paul Krugman was a pedophile, a smear for which there is no evidence – and one he also hurled at former President Joe Biden and former FBI director James Comey.”)

Heritage lists Antoni as its “Chief Economist.”

Krugman is correct when he insists that Heritage’s history is consistent with–and illustrative of– the story of the modern Right as a whole.

Heritage was never a respectable institution doing honest research. It was always in the business of telling lies on behalf of its wealthy supporters. But now it’s trying to turn itself into a MAGA/Groyper institution, less focused on telling economic lies and more focused on bigotry and conspiracy theories.

Krugman’s analyses are amply corroborated by Project 2025, which Wikipedia accurately describes as a political effort to “reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power in favor of right-wing policies.”

Roberts hasn’t changed the historic character of Heritage. He has merely–and probably accidentally– illustrated its true mission.

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