<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:transparent">On Sun, Aug 2, 2026 at 12:20 AM Gregory Jones <<a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com">spike@rainier66.com</a>> wrote:</span></div></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>Allergic reactions that screwed up people are undercounted because the correlation cannot be proven. </i></font></div></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b style="">For thousands of years that sort of thing ha<span class="gmail_default" style="">s</span> been a serious problem<span class="gmail_default" style="">,</span> but there is a relatively new revolutionary technique for overcoming that difficulty, it's called "science". Statistics show that during the Delta Wave variant of the COVID virus in 2021 an unvaccinated person was <u>10 times more likely to die</u> than somebody who received one Covid shot<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">,</span> and <u>14 times more likely to die</u><span class="gmail_default" style=""> </span>had <span class="gmail_default" style="">they </span>received an additional booster shot<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">.</span> And during the Omicron Wave variant of the virus in 2022 statistics show that unvaccinated people were 1<u>0 times more likely to die</u> than those who got the primary shot<span class="gmail_default" style="">,</span> and <u>20 times more likely to die</u> than those who had received an additional <span class="gmail_default" style="">Omicron </span>booster shot.</b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b style=""><br></b></font></div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>To this day I make sure I'm up-to-date on my Covid shots because even <span class="gmail_default" style="">now</span> in the US hundreds of <u>unvaccinated</u><span class="gmail_default" style=""> </span>people are dying every month from <span class="gmail_default" style="">Covid</span>. And I also make sure I'm up-to-date on my flu vaccine shots, and shingles vaccine shots, and pneumonia vaccine shots<span class="gmail_default" style="">,</span> and RSV vaccine shots, and tetanus vaccine shots. I do this because vaccines have saved more lives than any other human invention. And mRNA technology has saved more lives than any other technology developed <span class="gmail_default" style="">so far </span>in the 21st-century.</b></font><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div><span style="background-color:transparent"><br></span></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>The vaccine didn't work John. </i></font></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"></font><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>BULLSHIT! I will not apologize for using that word because medical misinformation of that sort is killing people. The <u>scientific consensus</u> is that if every American who could've been fully vaccinated had been fully vaccinated then 234,000 people who died of Covid would be alive today; but those 234,000 people preferred to listen to what ignoramuses at Fox, Newsmax and Breitbart had to say about the disease rather than what scientific journals like Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine had to say about the disease. And they paid the price for their ignorance. </b></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font size="4" style="" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b style=""><span style="background-color:transparent"><br></span></b></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font size="4" style="" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b style=""><span style="background-color:transparent">John K Clark</span></b></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:transparent"><br></span></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:transparent"><br></span></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:transparent"><br></span></font></div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Aug 1, 2026, 12:40 PM John Clark <<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Sat, Aug 1, 2026 at 2:55 PM Gregory Jones <</span><a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">spike@rainier66.com</a><span style="background-color:transparent;font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">> wrote:</span></div></div><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i>"I know personally at least four people who were harmed by the vaccine (two fatalities)</i></font></blockquote><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><b style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:large">I asked Claude (set to Extra) the following question<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">:</span></b></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><font size="4"><b><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></span><font face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default">Me: </span>In discussing Covid somebody said to me "I know personally at least four people who were harmed by the vaccine (two fatalities)". While not mathematically impossible I think that is pretty unlikely. Am I right?</font></b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b><br></b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b>And this was Claude's answer:<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span></b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div role="feed" aria-label="Chat messages" aria-describedby="_r_hl_" style="margin-bottom:0px"><div style="width:100%"><div style="display:flow-root"><div role="article" aria-label="Message 4 of 4"><div style="height:auto;opacity:1"><div style="opacity:1"><div><div><p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><span class="gmail_default"><b><font face="tahoma, sans-serif">Claude</font></b><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">: "</font></span><span style="background-color:transparent">Quantified statistical improbability through rigorous Fermi estimation</span></font></p></div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div></div></div></div></div></div><div><p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><u>Your intuition is right</u>, and the numbers back it up pretty strongly. Let's actually run it.</font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><strong>The base rates.</strong> From CDC/VAERS and academic surveillance data (Vaccine Safety Datalink, not just raw unverified reports):</font></p>
<ul dir="ltr">
<li><font size="4">Myocarditis/pericarditis: roughly 6–40 per million doses depending on age/sex/dose number, and <u>it's almost never fatal — no deaths from vaccine-associated myocarditis were confirmed in the US</u> as of early 2022, and a French cohort of over 4,600 post-vaccine myocarditis cases had zero in-hospital deaths and an 18-month mortality of jus<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">t 0.2%</span></font></li>
<li><font size="4">TTS (blood clots, J&J only): about 4 cases per million doses, with 9 deaths among 60 confirmed cases out of 18.6 million J&J doses — but J&J was a small slice of total US doses. <span></span></font></li>
<li><font size="4">Anaphylaxis: about 5 cases per million doses, rarely fatal with treatment. </font></li>
<li><font size="4">Raw VAERS death reports (unverified, just temporally associated, not causally confirmed): 19,476 reports across 672 million doses, or 0.0029% — CDC is explicit that a report doesn't mean the vaccine caused it. <span></span></font></li>
</ul>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4">So even taking the most generous possible reading — treating every single unverified VAERS death report as if it were confirmed caused by the vaccine (which is not what CDC or epidemiologists believe) — you get roughly 1 confirmed-or-alleged death per ~13,000–35,000 vaccinated people. The actual causally-confirmed rate is almost certainly much lower than that.</font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><strong>The network math.</strong> A generous personal network — everyone you've meaningfully known across your whole life, not just close friends — is maybe 500–1,500 people. At ~80% vaccination uptake, that's 400–1,200 vaccinated contacts.</font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4">Plugging in even the most charitable-to-the-claim numbers above (large network, raw uncritical VAERS rate as the death rate), the expected number of vaccine-caused deaths in one person's personal circle comes out to roughly 0.02–0.09. Poisson probability of seeing 2 or more against that expectation lands somewhere around <u>1-in-300 to 1-in-6,000. Using the more defensible causally-confirmed rates instead, it drops to somewhere around 1-in-100,000 or rarer. And that's before even accounting for the "4 harmed" part, which pushes the joint probability down further</u> still.</font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><strong>One more tell:</strong> in the actual data, fatality among confirmed vaccine adverse events is low — near 0% for myocarditis, ~15% for TTS, low for anaphylaxis. A claim of 2 deaths out of 4 total "harmed" (50% case-fatality) <u>doesn't match that profile at all</u>. That's a separate red flag beyond the raw base-rate math.</font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4">None of this means real vaccine injury doesn't happen — it does, in the rare categories above. But the specific claim of personally knowing 4 harmed with 2 deaths is the kind of thing that, if we take "harmed by the vaccine" to mean actually caused by it, <u>would be a wild statistical outlier</u> — one you'd expect to see maybe once in many thousands of similarly-sized personal networks, not something an ordinary person should expect to stumble into.</font></p>
<p dir="ltr"><font size="4">The much more common explanations for anecdotes like this: post hoc misattribution (someone who died or got sick shortly after vaccination, in a population where the elderly and immunocompromised were vaccinated first and have high baseline mortality/morbidity anyway), a loose definition of "harmed" that includes common expected side effects rather than the rare serious ones, or motivated recall within a social circle already primed to attribute health events to the vaccine. Doesn't mean the person is lying — just that "I know someone who..." is a notoriously unreliable way to estimate a population-level rate, precisely because of how salient and memorable these stories become once you're looking for them.<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b>John K Clark</b></span></font></p><font size="1" color="#ffffff">psr</font><p><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b><br></b></span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b><br></b></span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b><br></b></span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b><br></b></span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b><br></b></span></font></p><div style="border-left:none;padding:0px;display:flex"><div style="margin:0px;min-width:0px;padding:0px 0px 20px;width:auto"><div><div id="m_-4486987172346241977m_-856708685076025413gmail-:pf" style="direction:ltr;margin:8px 0px 0px;padding:0px;overflow-x:hidden"><div id="m_-4486987172346241977m_-856708685076025413gmail-:pe" style="direction:ltr;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-size-adjust:none;font-kerning:auto;font-feature-settings:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:1.5;overflow:auto hidden"><div id="m_-4486987172346241977m_-856708685076025413gmail-avWBGd-59"><div><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr" style="color:inherit;font-size:small">n Sat, Aug 1, 2026 at 4:01 AM John Clark <<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="color:inherit;font-size:small;margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:transparent">On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 10:03 PM Gregory Jones <<a href="mailto:spike@rainier66.com" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">spike@rainier66.com</a>> wrote:</span><span class="gmail_default" style="background-color:transparent"></span></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="auto"><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>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</i></font></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>I asked Claude (set to Extra) the following question "Was the cause of Covid a lab leak?<span class="gmail_default">" and this was his answer:</span></b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><span class="gmail_default"><b>==</b></span></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-size:large;background-color:transparent"><b><font face="georgia, serif">Claude:</font></b><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> "</font></span><span style="font-size:large;background-color:transparent">There's no scientific or intelligence consensus — the question remains genuinely unresolved and contested.</span></div><div class="gmail_quote"><p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><strong>On the intelligence side:</strong> U.S. agencies are split. The FBI assesses a lab-related origin as most likely with <u>moderate confidence</u>, and the Department of Energy reached a similar conclusion with l<u>ow confidence</u>. The CIA shifted in January 2025 to say a research-related origin is "more likely" than natural transmission, though only with l<u>ow confidence</u>, and it explicitly stated that b<u>oth research-related and natural origin scenarios remain plausible</u>. Other intelligence agencies continue to assess natural spillover as more likely, or say there's insufficient evidence to conclude either way. </font></p><p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><strong>On the scientific side:</strong> A 2025 WHO report found the pandemic's origins still uncertain, noting much of the information needed to evaluate the lab-leak theory was never made available to investigators. While a zoonotic (animal-to-human) origin is currently considered the best-supported hypothesis by available scientific data, the WHO says the question will remain inconclusive until more data or information is shared. Scientists remain divided as well.</font></p><div><div role="feed" aria-label="Chat messages" aria-describedby="_r_in_" style="margin-bottom:0px"><div style="width:782.871px"><div style="display:flow-root"><div role="article" aria-label="Message 2 of 2"><div style="height:auto;opacity:1"><div><div style="opacity:1"><div><div><div><div><div><p dir="ltr"><strong><font size="4">The core arguments on each side:</font></strong></p><ul dir="ltr"><li style="margin-left:15px"><font size="4"><em>Zoonotic spillover</em>: Early cases clustered around the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, which sold live wild animals; this mirrors past coronavirus outbreaks (SARS, MERS) that jumped from animals to humans.</font></li><li style="margin-left:15px"><font size="4"><em>Lab leak</em>: Wuhan hosts a major virology institute with a history of coronavirus research; some proponents argue certain genetic features of the virus, or the fact that all known cases trace to a single introduction event, are more consistent with an engineered or lab-adjacent origin than a natural spillover.</font></li></ul><p dir="ltr"><font size="4">Notably, some of this back-and-forth is politically charged — the current White House has published material asserting lab leak as the "true origin," while under the prior administration the <u>CIA had stayed agnostic for years before its 2025 shift, which by its own account was a reinterpretation of existing intelligence rather than new evidence</u>.</font></p><p dir="ltr"><font size="4">Bottom line: this is an active, unsettled dispute rather than a case with a definitive answer — treat any confident claim in either direction with some skepticism unless it's backed by specific new evidence.<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span></font></p><p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:large;background-color:transparent"><b><font face="tahoma, sans-serif">John K Clark</font></b></span></p><p dir="ltr"><font size="4"><br></font></p><font size="4"><br><br> </font><br><br><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:32 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><font size="4">Nobel prize winning economist <span style="background-color:transparent"><u>Paul Krugman</u> had something interesting to say a few days ago:</span></font><br></div><div><font size="4"><span style="background-color:transparent">===</span></font></div><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border-width:medium;border-style:none;border-color:currentcolor;padding:0px"><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;border-width:medium;border-style:none;border-color:currentcolor;padding:0px"><div><b><font size="6" face="tahoma, sans-serif"> Reality is a Communist Plot</font></b></div></blockquote></blockquote><div><font face="tahoma, sans-serif"><br></font><b style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:large;background-color:transparent"> by Paul Krugman</b></div><div><b style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:large;background-color:transparent"><br></b></div><div><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a49c1fa7-0056-4810-8036-dfa7a6f60aea?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">vaccines cause autism</a>. But <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/da5a2025-ec96-4773-a734-a0f1be26cb4c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">hydroxychloroquine</a> worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/abcbf591-99ca-4400-8842-fa3dfc792cb1?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">millions of people</a>.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c6b894f5-a94a-4880-a265-e80bbe76f163?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">massive TV blackout</a> 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 <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/3fe8b8c6-18e0-4500-ab3c-750b8fd86d2f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">didn’t rake</a> its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/f477f9fb-f775-4864-a952-28d2fd71d2f5?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">59 percent approval rating</a>.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">Trump won the 2020 election.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">Communism is the greatest threat facing America.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">What the ongoing <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/5381f7e7-a885-47be-8dfe-1fe50c569363?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">show trial of Fauci</a> — 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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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 <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/d4a07203-f369-4717-9c8b-c6093004660f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">think about politics</a> — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/b51cede3-a3b6-4f53-a618-0d553187cbe0?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">blackouts and brownouts every weekend</a>,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a886c68e-c550-4a12-9b0b-db828fbfbe8c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">buy groceries</a>, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/4e798ccd-8d7e-49a0-8d16-ae546e2baf0b?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">Looking back on the Spanish war</a>” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:</font></b></p><blockquote style="border-left:4px solid rgb(232,181,0);margin:20px 0px;padding:0px"><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><i>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.</i></font></b></p></blockquote><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:</font></b></p><blockquote style="border-left:4px solid rgb(232,181,0);margin:20px 0px;padding:0px"><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><i>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.</i></font></b></p></blockquote><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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?</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/249c4a19-6eff-4e54-bbd2-b3c11ac10ede?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" style="color:rgb(54,55,55)" target="_blank">endless applause moments</a>,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">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.</font></b></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 20px;color:rgb(54,55,55);line-height:26px"><b><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif">But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.</font></b></p></div></div></blockquote></div></blockquote></div></div></blockquote></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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