QOTD -- "Budgets As Propaganda"

"...The purpose of propaganda is to divorce us from reality, to push us to actions that would normally run against our interests or violate our moral code. In an administration that formed an anti-Christian bias taskforce, it is hard to think of anything less Christian than condemning millions of the most vulnerable people in the world to die. Of course, mercy and empathy are not just Christian values, but for a certain type of Christian nationalist they are values to be avoided. Propaganda makes such hypocrisies more palatable.

"When countries engage in a massive dismantling of their scientific infrastructure, they cannot do it quietly. It is so obviously counterproductive that it can only occur via a broader mobilization, where higher education or experts are treated as part of an evil corrupting the nation. Let’s celebrate the end of the elite!

"Trump’s budget echoes Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which used propaganda to justify an attack on higher education, fueling a lost decade for Chinese research and a much longer period of damage to state capacity and innovation. America is now pressing the self-destruct button on science just in time for China’s careful decades-long reinvestment to allow it to take the lead from us. Imagine a Sputnik moment, but where an American President leads a propaganda campaign to not compete with Russia.

"There is a broader pattern here: the embrace of propaganda has become the default tone of an administration no longer hiding it’s authoritarian impulses. Government press releases sound like unhinged Truth Social posts, likely because many of those writing the press releases were social media posters. White House Cabinet meetings and press events increasingly sound like something out of North Korea.

"On the day of bad economic news, Trump hosted a televised Cabinet team where officials took turns lavishing him with praise. Attorney General Bondi beat all comers, claiming that Trump had saved 258 million lives. The day before she had said it was 119 million lives. What sort of budgets can we expect from people for whom metrics are just one more tool of propaganda?..." -- excerpt from "Budgets As Propaganda," in Dan Moynihan's Substack "Can We Still Govern."  In a regime that values lies over truth, cruelty over compassion, ignorance over knowledge, and fascism over freedom, it's no surprise the Malignant Fascist's budget reflects those values.  Moynihan's full article deserves a read, and if there are any spines left in Congress, they need to sink this manifestation of the MF's id.