[ExI] Reality is a Communist Plot

[Gregory Jones]

If Krugman forgot to add to his list of conspiracy theories one still
gaining popularity: that Covid was not a lab leak.  That one is still
making the rounds.  spike

On Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:32 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Nobel prize winning economist *Paul Krugman* had something interesting to
> say a few days ago:
> ===
>
> *             Reality is a Communist Plot*
>
>
> *                                                    by Paul Krugman*
>
> *The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism
> <https://substack.com/redirect/a49c1fa7-0056-4810-8036-dfa7a6f60aea?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.
> But hydroxychloroquine
> <https://substack.com/redirect/da5a2025-ec96-4773-a734-a0f1be26cb4c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> worked,
> and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people
> <https://substack.com/redirect/abcbf591-99ca-4400-8842-fa3dfc792cb1?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.*
>
> *Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout
> <https://substack.com/redirect/c6b894f5-a94a-4880-a265-e80bbe76f163?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> during
> the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t
> shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America,
> not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake
> <https://substack.com/redirect/3fe8b8c6-18e0-4500-ab3c-750b8fd86d2f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> its
> 2 million square miles of boreal forest.*
>
> *We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a
> deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of
> the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.*
>
> *The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59
> percent approval rating
> <https://substack.com/redirect/f477f9fb-f775-4864-a952-28d2fd71d2f5?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.*
>
> *Trump won the 2020 election.*
>
> *Communism is the greatest threat facing America.*
>
> *The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants
> (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates
> scientists.*
>
> *What the ongoing show trial of Fauci
> <https://substack.com/redirect/5381f7e7-a885-47be-8dfe-1fe50c569363?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> —
> which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what
> Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they
> want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points
> out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to
> shoot the messenger.*
>
> *Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people
> on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high
> housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists
> insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even
> how most voters think about politics
> <https://substack.com/redirect/d4a07203-f369-4717-9c8b-c6093004660f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> —
> is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.*
>
> *I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try
> to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and
> admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.*
>
> *But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s
> something far more extreme.*
>
> *If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t
> hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss
> scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re
> perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the
> face.*
>
> *Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which
> nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has
> “blackouts and brownouts every weekend
> <https://substack.com/redirect/b51cede3-a3b6-4f53-a618-0d553187cbe0?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
> when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that
> you must show ID to buy groceries
> <https://substack.com/redirect/a886c68e-c550-4a12-9b0b-db828fbfbe8c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,
> which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.*
>
> *Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it,
> that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even
> accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says
> that they don’t.*
>
> *George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about
> this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war
> <https://substack.com/redirect/4e798ccd-8d7e-49a0-8d16-ae546e2baf0b?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>”
> he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:*
>
> *In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what
> they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must
> make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed
> and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a
> considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
> everyone.*
>
> *Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore,
> reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:*
>
> *If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well,
> it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two
> are five.*
>
> *If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the
> top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?*
>
> *What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if
> they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet,
> anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any
> deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members
> of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many
> Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between
> fantasy and reality.*
>
> *But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches
> are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments
> <https://substack.com/redirect/249c4a19-6eff-4e54-bbd2-b3c11ac10ede?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
> because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to
> stop clapping.*
>
> *The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a
> surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves
> a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious
> fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a
> subject to be delved into another day.*
>
> *What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on
> America as a whole.*
>
> *Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would
> have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to
> refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and
> other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with
> Trump or his successor still in charge.*
>
> *Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution
> even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.*
>
> *And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he
> won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our
> weapon stocks with stunning speed.*
>
> *But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.*
>
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