What does the beatification of Charlie Kirk say about us?

The interview began calmly enough. NPR's Steve Inskeep was talking to Joe Mitchell, a former Iowa state representative and founder of Run Gen Z, a group with the goal of electing young conservatives. Mitchell was a friend of Charlie Kirk, and described him as a mentor.

Inskeep asked Mitchell about his relationship with Kirk, and allowed Mitchell to describe it in some detail. Mitchell said Kirk was "a friend, and he was a mentor. And, you know, Charlie was a God-fearing man, and he was a father and a husband and a patriot and friend to many."

Mitchell described how Charlie Kirk helped him start Run Gen Z. Inskeep was interested in Kirk's role in getting the group going. Mitchell willingly explained, ending with: "And so, you know, again, can't overstate how huge of a impact Charlie had not only in my personal life, but also professionally - Run Gen Z." This was September 11, the day after Kirk's murder. Mitchell was surely grief stricken.

Inskeep then said: "I'm thinking his public persona - Charlie Kirk's public persona is very well known at this point. He was in public so much. He was in front of people or on camera so much. He made a lot of polarizing remarks about people who were different from him or had different views from him, but he also stood in front of people who disagreed with him and engaged with them and took their questions and criticisms and responded. I'm just curious. Having known him over a number of years, do you think that he learned or evolved in any way from his interactions with so many different kinds of people?"

Inskeep's phrasing was about as measured and diplomatic as could possibly be.

Mitchell's voice dripped with incredulous indignation: "Steve, what remarks? What are you guys talking about?"

He continued: "Because here's what happened, Steve, is that he was called a Nazi and Hitler and a fascist for so many years, and that's what led to the shooting yesterday. And it's despicable. What the news media is doing right now is saying that he was so divisive. He said these things. Charlie was the most kindest person in the entire world that I knew. He believed in civic debate more than anybody else that I knew. And so the rhetoric that's been spewed out in the last 24 hours is what led to the shooting yesterday and the execution and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And it makes me just sick to my stomach what's happened. And so people need to get ahold of the rhetoric. They need to understand that what they say has implications. And that's what happened yesterday."

What remarks? Joe Mitchell asked. I suppose we need to list some. Doing so is depressing.

Charlie Kirk said: "The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different." And: "You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated." [my italics -mb]

Like many before him (including Trump), Kirk characterized the vast numbers of migrants (who were overwhelmingly refugees and asylum seekers) at the southern border as an "invasion of the country." Not a swarming teeming writhing out-of-control poorly regulated mass migration of men, women, and children fleeing horrors, but an invasion. Which of course is a threat.

Texas, Kirk said, should ignore legalities and take matters into its own hands. "I know so many amazing patriots in the great state of Texas, and I love Texas, that have been waiting and are willing for this moment. Deputize a citizen force, put them on the border, give them handcuffs, get it done. Sure that's dramatic. You know what's dramatic? The invasion of the country."

The Left, he emphasized, is guilty of a replacement conspiracy. "The other side," Kirk said, "has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America." [my italics -mb]

White people are imperiled, intentionally and by design. They need to fight back.

"Whiteness is great," Kirk posted on Twitter. "Be proud of who you are."

Democrats, Charlie Kirk said, "love it when America becomes less white." Immigration is a threat to whiteness. He said the "Democrat Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse." Well that seems polarizing. [my italics -mb]

On a lark, I decided to see if Charlie Kirk had anything to say about the hateful and unfounded claims last year that Haitian immigrants were eating peoples' pets. Alas, he was a principal early instigator. A September 11, 20204 report titled "The Origins of Trump’s Ohio Pets Conspiracy" in New Lines Magazine put Kirk near the beginning of the conspiracy, after which it was quickly picked up by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. The subtitle of the article is "Local racists claimed that Haitians were eating pets; Republicans then turned it national."

From the article: "The origins of the conspiracy theory remain largely unknown, but a New Lines investigation has identified several points of amplification from known spreaders of disinformation. Its fairly rapid spread reveals how extremist narratives travel from the fringes of the internet into the mouths of politicians, seemingly overnight."

The article continued:

Less than a week earlier, End Wokeness, an account on X (formally Twitter) that has been connected in the past to the white nationalist Jack Posobiec, shared a Facebook post alleging that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. The claim was quickly repeated by the political commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, during his broadcast hosted on Steve Bannon’s media network.

Kirk commented that this brought the United States “one step closer to the great replacement,” referring to a white nationalist narrative that claims non-white immigrants are replacing white people in the U.S. The narrative was originally obscure but has been increasingly embraced by the GOP mainstream in recent years.

Kirk is a close associate of Posobiec. Both his claims and the End Wokeness account’s tweet reference a single anonymous post on a private Facebook group as proof of their claims.

 

On September 13, 2024, Newsweek had this:

 

A man has accused conservative political activist Charlie Kirk and his team of taking advantage of his grandparents for a video about claims that pets are being eaten in Springfield.

Accusations that Haitians are eating cats, dogs, ducks and geese in the Ohio city have been spread across the U.S., despite being debunked by city officials. The claims were even repeated by former President Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday night.

On Thursday, Kirk, one of the first conservative figures to pedal the allegations, posted a video made by FRONTLINES Turning Point USA that showed residents saying "ducks are disappearing" and reporting that they have heard of pets being abducted. [links in the original -mb]

Not just immigrants. Not just Haitians. Jews, Charlie Kirk insisted, also threaten whites. "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," he said. 

The threat isn't just Jews and brown people. He had plenty to say about Blacks.

"In urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact," Kirk said. There's no credible evidence for this, and it's been widely criticized as hate speech.

"More than six hundred white women a year are murdered by Black men," Kirk also said, after admitting that he didn't "know if that stat is real." He said it anyway.

Kirk told his show's audience that "by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested." Actually, it's almost half, according to the University of Maryland in 2014. What that by now dated article also said, and Charlie Kirk didn't say, was that by age 23, almost 40 percent of white males have also been arrested. (Both statistics seem shocking to me.) Aggressive and biased policing against Blacks can partially explain this gap. For example and to illustrate, Blacks and Whites use marijuana at similar rates, but Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession—about 3.6 times more than Whites. [my italics -mb]

Charlie Kirk said: "If I see a Black pilot, I'm gonna be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified.'" He justified that by saying the Black pilot might be an affirmative action hire. You never know, right? He also blamed affirmative action for his prejudice that the Black women Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson "do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously." Charlie hated affirmative action because it made him think unwholesome things about Black people: "If I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I don't -- I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?" Kirk needn't wonder about moronic White women.

Only a racist could anguish so much about what affirmative action is doing to his brain. Charlie wasn't alone in imputing blame. Donald Trump blamed DEI for the DC plane crash that killed 67 people, on no evidence at all, saying the assumption was "common sense." And if you're a racist or bigot, it surely is.

Charlie Kirk said that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson "is what your country looks like on critical race theory." He said "Kamala Harris has now become the jive speaking spokesperson of equity." He said "MLK [Martin Luther King] was awful. He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe." Charlie Kirk said: "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s."

Tell us, Joe Mitchell: Was Steve Inskeep right when he said that Charlie Kirk's "remarks" were  "polarizing?" Can we at least agree on that?

As I said, this is all very depressing. And yet we must continue.

In an editorial demanding battle with the political left, Charlie Kirk said: "'Investigate first, define the crimes later' should be the order of the day. And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy." Why? Because Donald Trump was indicted in four different venues.

Charlie Kirk was as anti-Muslim as he was anti-Black and anti-brown. He said: "America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank. Large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America." He said "Islam is not compatible with western civilization." He asked "are you comfortable with both London and New York having Muslim mayors? I'm sorry. I think we should have a little bit of caution with that. That doesn't feel right." Kirk called New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (a Muslim, a legal immigrant, and a naturalized citizen) a "parasite." "It’s legal immigration that is also the problem," Kirk said. "When you allow a bunch of people into your country legally and they don’t share your values, turns out they don’t always assimilate." Charlie made it abundantly clear what his values were.

Charlie Kirk said: "There is no separation of church and state." If Charlie was right, then Thomas Jefferson must have been mistaken. It was Jefferson who said, in correspondence in 1802, that the first amendment to the Constitution created "a wall of separation between Church & State." Those were Jefferson's words. Jefferson had long been best friends with James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and had strongly advocated for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution. The first ten amendments constituted that Bill.

In addition to what Charlie Kirk had to say about racial and religious minorities, he was also a genuine all around conspiracy theorist. According to ABC News, he "spread falsehoods about voter fraud during the 2020 election and misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine." According to Wikipedia, he "promoted climate change denial, calling global warming a hoax." He said there is "no factual data to back up global warming" and that scientists do not know the cause. (I wrote this on the overwhelming scientific consensus. As for factual data about measured warming, see this, this, this, and this.) According to Wikipedia, he did not believe human activity is the driver of climate change. (On the matter of belief, I wrote this and this.)

On the 2020 election, Charlie Kirk asked: "How do we explain the 100% ballot drop in Michigan, where just every ballot that was dropped was just for Joe Biden. Why is no one asking about Dominion Voting Systems?" Of course, on the right there was nonstop and baseless "asking" about Dominion, and Fox News ultimately settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion for almost $800 million. If Fox had incriminating evidence against Dominion, it would surely have produced it. The claims about Dominion, such as ties to Hugo Chavez, were nonsensical.

We could go on, almost endlessly. We could describe how Charlie Kirk said "College campuses have become islands of totalitarianism & intolerance." Columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote that Kirk's "first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who 'discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.'"

"The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right," Bouie wrote. "Targets of the watchlist," he wrote, "attest to harassment and threats of violence." [Bouie's link -mb]

Whether you abhor it or extol it, this is Charlie Kirk's legacy. Can we at least agree with Steve Inskeep that he was polarizing?

On the same Morning Edition program as Steve Inskeep's interview, NPR host Michel Martin spoke with Matt Schlapp, CPAC Chairman and former White House political director in the administration of George W. Bush. As was Joe Mitchell, Schlapp was a friend of Kirk's. Martin acknowledged that this was "a difficult day." Her first question was: "So Charlie Kirk was obviously a gifted man. What would you say his gifts were?" With Martin's prompting, Schlapp described them.

The conversation turned to feeling safe at public events, and veered into Schlapp's experience fleeing the White House on 9/11.

Schlapp: "And I will say this. I don't talk much about what the threats you face when you're in these types of positions because I think, you know, there's no sense instilling panic in people, but we're in a very bad and dark place in our country when it comes to violence. And I think we're just seeing a rapidity of really shocking events."

He continued: "And, you know, what I would encourage everyone to do is fight like heck in politics, you know, push, push, push for what you want. But at the end of the day, you've got to - you've - there's got to remain some respect for those that you're fighting and an understanding that they're doing what they think is right, too. And the other thing that needs to happen is, quite frankly, people in the media - we need to stop villainizing people. You know, people have ideas, and, you know, might not like them. There's a lot of people whose ideas I think are abhorrent. But, you know, would I help them change their tire if they were on the side of the road? Hope I would."

To which Martin asked: "But, you know, on Newsmax, yesterday, you called on leaders of the left to stop normalizing hatred and violence. Are you also calling on leaders of the right to do the same?"

Martin pointed out that "Two elected Democratic state officials and their spouses were shot in Minnesota by a man who had a hit list of 45 elected Democrats he intended to kill. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband attacked in his home, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's official residence set on fire." She said violence seems to be "an equal opportunity problem."

Schapp said: "Well, I'm not sure it's equal, but I think there were examples on both sides that are repugnant." He then got wound up with increasing indignation, saying: "Someone who's very close to my family and to the conservative movement was assassinated yesterday," and "I don't think this is the right moment for you to say to me that I am not sufficiently concerned about violence that happens from anyone [only violence on the left, as Schapp said on Newsmax -mb]. I think this is a moment to reflect on the life of a young man who made a big difference. And a lot of people are mourning it."

This, from the NPR transcript, is how the conversation ended:

MARTIN: Yes.

SCHLAPP: And it is the wrong time for you to start assigning blame and to say I should have better commentary.

MARTIN: Oh, forgive me, but didn't you surface that issue, and am I not...

SCHLAPP: Ma'am.

MARTIN: ...Listening to you?

SCHLAPP: I can understand why you're getting defunded. This is outrageous.

MARTIN: I'm sorry that you feel that way.

SCHLAPP: This young man deserves some thoughtful appreciation this morning.

MARTIN: And we...

SCHLAPP: He's the father of two children.

MARTIN: And we certainly are giving him that.

SCHLAPP: And you're turning this into just (ph)...

MARTIN: No, I think we're certainly giving him the attention he deserves. [On that point, in the entire interview Martin did not mention a single controversial viewpoint of Kirk's. -mb]

So here we are. The fact that Charlie Kirk's views (laid out in painful detail above) were odious does not and cannot justify his murder, but their broad acceptance surely says something troubling about us. Charlie Kirk's rapid glorification raises profound and disturbing questions about what kind of people we are.

Joe Mitchell complained that Charlie Kirk "was called a Nazi and Hitler and a fascist for so many years, and that's what led to the shooting yesterday." But what if he was in fact a fascist, as what I've laid out above might suggest? If he actually was a fascist, would it be wrong to say so, as a descriptive matter? Would it be wrong to warn that fascistic tendencies and prescriptions threaten the values and constitutional foundations of the country? Whatever you rightly call his beliefs, they weren't good—at least not from my side of our yawning societal divide.

Joe Mitchell said Charlie was "a God-fearing man" who "was the most kindest person in the entire world that I knew." Isn't that remarkable? Charlie's wife, Erika, said Charlie "went to see the face of his Savior." One can only wonder what that meeting was like, and how Charlie is handling the throngs of colored people he wanted out of his country, but with whom he now shares heaven.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

The experts were right. They usually are.

Noncitizen voting, and voter fraud more broadly, has been an enduring myth on the right for many, many years: one of those alternative realities that just won't die.

It's the nature of alternative realities and the minds that inhabit them that empirical evidence counts for nothing. So it matters not at all to those inhabitants that whenever anybody has made a serious attempt to look for noncitizen voting in the United States, they find that it is vanishingly rare—rare enough to conclude that it's essentially nonexistent. Election and democracy experts have examined the question many times, and the conclusion is always the same: The U.S. has hardly any voter fraud.

Updated tools have recently been brought to bear on the question of noncitizen voting. On September 4, Louisiana's secretary of state, Nancy Landry, announced that Louisiana was "the first state in the nation to use the newly revamped SAVE [Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements] database from the Department of Homeland Security" to analyze the state's voter rolls. The SAVE database was designed to help states verify the citizenship and immigration status of people applying for government benefits, and its use is being extended to analyzing voter rolls.

The Department of Homeland Security has expanded the range of personal data that agencies can access through SAVE. SAVE is itself problematic because it has potential to create false positives due to bad data, meaning that persons could be incorrectly identified as being noncitizens. At the same time, DHS has allowed state and local election officials to search for hundreds of thousands of voters simultaneously.

When Louisiana used SAVE to look at voter records going back to the 1980s, it found up to 390 registered voters who could be non-citizens. Of those, 79 voted at least once during that more than 40-year period. The number is minuscule relative to the number of votes cast.

The Brennan Center For Justice says: "To put that number in perspective, we estimate that at least 74 million votes have been cast in Louisiana since the 1980s — and that estimate is a significant undercount due to data limitations. In other words, out of tens of millions of ballots cast in Louisiana over more than 40 years, only a tiny fraction of them were possibly cast by noncitizens, and even those cases are unconfirmed."

The Brennan Center adds that "list-matching alone — whether with SAVE or any other database, all of which contain flaws — isn’t enough to identify ineligible voters, let alone voter fraud. That’s why Landry has rightly acknowledged that the actual number could be even lower, as some of the potential noncitizen voter registrations flagged by the SAVE program could be the result of outdated or inaccurate data."

Once again, noncitizen voting has been shown to be practically nonexistent.

Contrast Louisiana's results with the beliefs of conspiracy-addled right wing minds. One such mind belongs to Mike Johnson, who is presently speaker of the House, and who also happens to be a congressman from Louisiana.

As I wrote last year, Johnson said: "We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections."

Johnson also said that noncitizen voting poses a "clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system."  It does no such thing. As an empirical matter, noncitizen voting is neither clear nor present.

A mind situated in a powerful role that uses intuition to know things that can only be verified with evidence—evidence that in this case thoroughly refutes the intuition—is a very dangerous mind indeed. Johnson has shown repeatedly that his own mind struggles with reality. Notably, he was a proponent and agitator in Congress of the utterly false belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

Regarding human-caused global warming, on which there's overwhelming scientific consensus, Johnson said: "The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver." To which I said Johnson doesn't think at all. His beliefs are utterly disconnected from any kind of principled learning. How dismaying that this mind is second in line to the presidency. The two ahead of him, and the one behind, are no better.

The possibility of widespread noncitizen voting and other forms of election fraud has been examined many times over the years, both by experts and officials performing good-faith investigations, and by partisans who were just sure that it was happening. Whenever it's looked for, it's found to be essentially nonexistent.

Two noteworthy partisan inquiries occurred in recent years. One was the months-long "audit" under the auspices of Arizona Republicans examining 2020 Maricopa County election ballots, looking for fraud. Amusingly, the audit ended up finding 99 additional votes for Biden, and 261 fewer votes for Trump. Arizona was an epicenter of 2020 election controversy.

President Donald Trump himself convened a very short-lived commission created by executive order in May 2017 following Trump's unsubstantiated claims that millions (millions!) of illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 election, costing him the popular vote. Its aim was to investigate voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression, with Vice President Mike Pence as chair and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chair. The commission held only two meetings, produced no major findings, issued no reports, and had no impact on election laws. It disbanded in January 2018.

Trump had repeatedly claimed that illegal voting was responsible for his loss of the popular vote in 2016. Shortly after the election, Trump tweeted that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" but provided no evidence for this assertion. In private meetings with congressional leaders, Trump claimed that 3 to 5 million immigrants living in the country had voted illegally, again offering no substantiating proof.

These are the myths that Republicans tell each other. "A a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," Trump said during the September 10 presidential debate last year. "They can't even speak English, they don't know even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country." Mike Johnson said "I think that ultimately they hope to turn all these illegals into voters for their side. It sounds sinister, but there's no other explanation for what's happening down there."

Perhaps in Johnson's broken brain there really is no other explanation. Isn't that incredible?

Republicans have long sought remedies to a nonexistent problem that could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. Remedies such as onerous voter id laws and restrictions, and massive purges of the voter registration rolls. Last year a judge ordered Alabama to stop such a purge when thousands of purged voters were found to be citizens.

Louisiana isn't the only state that's gone looking for noncitizen voting and found basically none. In April, Michigan announced that a review had found 15 credible cases in more than 5.7 million total ballots cast in the 2024 general election. These 15 possible cases represent a mere 0.00028 percent of all votes, which is beyond negligible. Not even a rounding error. If, as Mike Johnson imagines, Democrats are trying "to turn all these illegals into voters for their side," they're doing a pretty pathetic job of it.

Last year while announcing its own massive purge Texas said it had found 1,930 "potential" noncitizen voters. In July, however, the state's attorney general announced investigations into just 100 "potential" noncitizen voters in the 2020 and 2022 elections, and just 33 "potential" noncitizen voters in the 2024 election. Around 11.3 million votes were cast in the 2024 election in Texas. That works out to just one potential noncitizen vote for every 342,000 votes cast. Not a great way to steal an election.

In a report issued in July, The Center for Election Innovation & Research said that "the vast majority of allegations of noncitizen registration or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data."

There is clearly no nefarious conspiracy. In the few cases where noncitizens register to vote, it's often due to bureaucratic errors or a misunderstanding about eligibility, not intentional fraud. Whatever the reason, the numbers are tiny. All this recent activity trying to chase down a nonexistent problem follows many years and multitudes of earlier studies by real experts, experts who have always said the U.S. just doesn't have a problem of voter fraud or illegal voting, much less noncitizens voting. As any thinking person would  expect, the experts were right. After all, expertise and being right generally go together, else expertise has no meaning.

 

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Were we lied to about the Covid vaccines?

Remember the remarkable first reports of Covid vaccine efficacy in the fall of 2020? There was talk during their development about how good the vaccines would have to be to achieve so-called "herd immunity." Seventy percent? Eighty? More?

So when the trials showed the two new mRNA vaccines had around 95 percent efficacy against infection, it was the kind of stunningly good news that nobody dared hope for.

A wild rush to vaccinate ensued in early 2021. The Biden administration far exceeded its own aggressive goals to get many millions of doses in arms. By March 12, 100 million doses had been administered in the United States. By the end of March, 130 million. Back then almost everybody wanted to be vaccinated, and local, state, and federal government agencies all aligned energetically to accomplish the mission. It was a remarkable achievement.

But in early summer 2021, the bloom seemingly began to come off the rose. The first "breakthrough" infections were reported. Thousands of fully vaccinated (with two doses) men gathered in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a July 4 celebration. 346 of them developed Covid, many with mild or no symptoms. Four were hospitalized. It suddenly seemed in the public's mind that the vaccines were failing; that the promised protection had been a sham.

Many believed they'd been lied to; that they'd been falsely promised long term immunity; that getting vaccinated would put Covid in the rear-view mirror more or less permanently.

All this was the result of a complicated mix of understandable initial enthusiasm, less than ideal communication (also understandable) about what to expect going forward, and a growing understanding of the virus and the vaccines over time. Don't forget: In the early going we didn't know much about how the virus would behave, only that it was killing thousands of people. In the messy context of an evolving pandemic, this confusion was unsurprising and, in my opinion, quite forgivable. Inevitable, even. The correct early urgency was getting people vaccinated; doing so saved countless lives. What would come next wasn't nearly as important.

Even so, what was not well communicated was that the early strong protection against infection was never likely persist, and not just because the virus was evolving more ways to evade the immune system. (A succession of variants became ever more virulent, even as they became somewhat less deadly.) In his book Tell Me When It's Over, Dr. Paul Offit M.D., a vaccine specialist, beautifully explains why that is so, and in so doing answers questions I've long had about why some vaccines provide lifelong immunity against certain diseases, while other's don't.

Consider the measles vaccine. If you have had measles, or have had two doses of the measles vaccine, you will likely be immune to infection for the rest of your life. The reason has to do with how the immune system works, and with the very long incubation time of the measles virus, which is 10 to 14 days. I'll get back to that below.

The immune system consists of several components. The front-line immune response involves antibodies, which directly deactivate the virus. If you have abundant antibodies circulating against the virus, then you're protected against outright infection, because the antibodies immediately go to work against the virus as soon as it's detected. Both vaccination and natural infection stimulate the body to produce antibodies, but the antibodies are short lived. They typically fade after 3 to 6 months, after which you're not well protected against infection. 

So the initial 95 percent efficacy against infection of the Covid vaccines was quite real. Because the vaccine trials only lasted a few months, most vaccinated participants had abundant antibodies over the duration of the trials, and were thus protected against infection. The urgency to get the vaccines to the public meant the trials were necessarily short, and so they were unable to test the longer term durability of the induced antibodies. Not that it really mattered, at least for purposes of keeping people alive.

The other important components of the immune system are memory B cells and memory T cells. The T cells kill the body's own cells that have become infected. The B cells recognize the virus and stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies which, as we've seen, deactivate the virus directly and can actually protect against infection if they're present when the virus shows up. The problem is that it takes time for the B cells to ramp up the immune response to produce abundant antibodies. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid, has a very short incubation period. It takes just 3 days from initial exposure to the onset of symptoms. That's not enough time for the B cells to make enough antibodies to stop the infection. If antibodies weren't already present, then at least a mild infection is inevitable. That's not a deficiency in the vaccine; it's entirely a function of the virus's short incubation period.

Whereas a mild infection develops just a few days after initial exposure, it takes a couple of weeks for a serious Covid infection (one that requires hospitalization) to develop. That's ample time for the B cells to ramp up antibody production. Eventually antibodies become sufficiently abundant to shut down the disease progression, and serious disease doesn't develop. That's crucial. But even if you're spared from serious disease, you can still have an infection that's plenty unpleasant.

And whereas antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 fade after 3 to 6 months, the memory B cells and T cells are longer lived—perhaps much longer. We're still trying to determine exactly how long, but current evidence suggests one year to perhaps many years. The upshot is that the vaccines produce short lived (antibody) protection against infection, but long term (B and T cell) protection against severe disease. Thus the protection provided is real and significant. It's just that we always wanted to not get infected at all, and that is clearly not what we got.

But what explains the lifelong immunity against measles infection, and why don't the Covid vaccines provide something similar? It is this. Absent recent exposure to the virus, you don't have circulating measles antibodies, just like you might not have circulating SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. But if you've ever had measles or have been vaccinated against it, you do have memory B cells and memory T cells that normally last a lifetime. The long measles incubation period of 10 to 14 days gives the B cells time to manufacture antibodies when you're exposed to the virus, and those antibodies shut down the infection before any symptoms occur. Unlike with Covid, you don't just have protection against severe disease, but against mild disease too. This explains what's sometimes called "sterilizing immunity" against measles, plus other viruses such as polio. It's all about how long the particular virus's incubation period is.

Because coronaviruses have very short incubation periods, we probably shouldn't expect vaccines to ever provide durable protection against infection. But they do provide very good protection against hospitalization, ventilation, and death. By the way, because of its short incubation period, the notion of "herd immunity" against Covid, when understood to be no disease spread in the community, is nonsense. The virus will always spread because infection occurs before the immune system can stop it. (We knew from very early in the pandemic, in 2020, that people could spread Covid before they developed symptoms.)

Should those caveats have all been thoroughly aired at the outset, in late 2020, as vaccines were about to be deployed? I don't know. The overall communication was unsurprisingly muddled, given the novelty of the virus and the urgency of the moment, with many thousands of deaths. Stopping those deaths involves protecting against severe disease, which the vaccines always did and still do. But the reported 95 percent efficacy against infection was absorbed by the public as an exhilarating guarantee, even if it wasn't meant to be.

It's worth noting that Anthony Fauci himself worried as early as June 2020, months before the vaccines became available, that vaccine immunity against Covid might not be durable. If Covid-19 acts like other coronaviruses, he said, "it likely isn't going to be a long duration of immunity. When you look at the history of coronaviruses, the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that's protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year. That's not a lot of durability and protection."

Fauci said that. 

The record shows over and over that claims that Fauci over-promised about the vaccines are just false. In a February 4, 2021 interview, just as the vaccination campaign was ramping up, Fauci said: "One of the things that we do know is that the vaccines that we have, although they are less effective in preventing disease ... when you look at serious disease with hospitalizations and deaths, the vaccines still have a pretty important, positive effect even on the mutants [ie., the newly emerging variants -mb]."

Less effective at preventing disease, Fauci said. So even as the vaccines were being rolled out, Fauci was noting that vaccines don't prevent infection, but they were still important.

On February 27 Fauci said vaccinated people "could conceivably get infected, get no symptoms and still have virus in your nasal pharynx, which means that you would have to wear a mask to prevent you from infecting someone else, as well as the other side of the coin, where you may not be totally protected yourself."

Not totally protected yourself. 

To underscore everything we've said here: Covid vaccines generally don't prevent infection, at least not after the antibodies fade. But they do—emphatically do—protect against severe disease. And that might well keep you from dying. There are various analyses out there, but the consensus opinion is that vaccines prevented a few million deaths in the U.S., and around 15 million worldwide. It's estimated that a couple of hundred thousand people in the U.S. died unnecessarily because they refused to get vaccinated. And even now, after a progression of variants—Alpha, Delta, Omicron, etc.—the vaccines are still preventing severe disease.

If you were under the misunderstanding that the vaccines would prevent infection forever, get over it. What to do going forward? Writing in 2023, Dr. Offit said that three vaccine doses (the primary series plus a booster), or natural infection plus two vaccine doses, have both been shown to produce durable immunity against severe disease. Offit says it's incumbent upon the CDC to ultimately determine how long that immunity (provided by the memory B and memory T cells) lasts. (Good luck with that under RFK Jr.) Offit assumes for now that the protection is relatively durable, especially for younger people or those without other medical conditions. Most of the deaths now occurring are in people over age 75; for them it's a very different story.

Offit wrote: "I'm under 75 and otherwise healthy. I have received three doses of a Covid vaccine; the last dose was given in November 2021. Six months later I had a mild Covid illness caused by one of the Omicron variants (probably BA.2). I will likely be protected against severe Covid for years. But I don't know that. And I need to know. I will look to the CDC and academic researchers to determine how long immunity against severe disease lasts for people like me and then, only then, will I get a booster dose."

Me? I'm over 65 but under 75. To date I've mostly been boosted every six months or so. I have never had a confirmed Covid infection. In the past year I had a viral infection that tested negative for Covid. I also had a weeks-long viral infection in early 2021, starting about 5 days after my second vaccine dose in the primary series. At-home testing was not available back then. Covid? No way to know.

By now an overwhelming majority of the country has some Covid immunity, either from infection or vaccination or both. The nationwide death rate has dropped accordingly. Presently persons over 75 are by far at the highest risk of severe disease and death. Regular boosting makes sense for them. Dr. Offit, a pediatrician, also says women should also get a Covid shot during each pregnancy. That's because pregnant persons have serious illness at significantly higher rates than non-pregnant persons. Furthermore, late in pregnancy a fetus obtains antibodies against Covid through the placenta, and those antibodies provide protection for the first half year of life, until the baby is old enough to be vaccinated. Perversely, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has personally revoked the CDC's previous recommendation that pregnant women get vaccinated.

Finally, Kennedy recently canceled $500 million in government-funded mRNA vaccine research, terminating 22 grants. These involved research on mRNA vaccines against influenza, against cancer, and more. Kennedy, a longtime virulent anti-vaxxer, falsely said that "these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu." In fact, the performance of mRNA vaccines during the Covid pandemic (and still) has been exemplary. As I've already noted, they've saved millions of lives. The mRNA platform uniquely enables very rapid vaccine development—something that will be badly needed when the next pandemic, such as bird flu, emerges. The outrage and dismay in the public health community at Kennedy's action has been profound.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

May I recommend?

By now you've probably have heard that yesterday's job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job creation in July was far less than expected. Even more remarkable was the extremely large downward revision of the May and June numbers (revisions are common, but this one was very large), which removed a whopping 258,000 jobs from those two months. In all, it was a gloomy indication that the labor market is much weaker than we'd thought, which is consistent with other indications of a weakening economy. For example, GDP growth is running about a point lower than the past couple of years.

You've probably also heard that Trump fired the BLS commissioner because he was unhappy with the report. Fire the messenger. This is banana republic stuff. Tin-hat dictator stuff. Trump said the numbers were fake, rigged, etc., to make him look bad. Sure they were.

As it happens, I wrote a piece in 2019 that discussed an unexpectedly strong jobs report during Trump's first term. I explained back then that any conspiratorial notion that the numbers were cooked to make Trump look good was nonsense. I explained at length that whereas the ideological right reliably descends into irrational conspiracy theories, the ideological left has a far healthier view of reality. In particular, the left implicitly accepts that the BLS job statistics are an objective assessment produced and reported by competent career professionals who do their work with integrity, and that any attempt to falsify the numbers would utterly fail and be exposed.

The piece is extremely relevant to what's happening now, and I highly recommend that you read it. And it's a pretty good read, if I do say so myself. Among other concerns about good governance and such, the core and most important point is how we discern fundamental reality. And make no mistake: The left and right discern reality very differently.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here. 

 

Prescient.

Who wrote this, way back in May of 2020?

He [Trump] says the next election will be rigged, just as he said the last one was rigged when he believed he would lose it. Constitutional scholars are preparing for what happens when Trump refuses to leave the White House after losing in November. Coronavirus turmoil and Trump turmoil might rage simultaneously during a national winter of despair.

Such times. The president of the United States scurrilously promotes the baseless conspiracy theory that Joe Scarborough murdered an employee decades ago. He's ready to start shooting in Minneapolis. Twitter is now flagging his tweets as false or dangerous. Our national psyche is being thoroughly gutted, as a desperate, pathologically deranged, narcissistic president becomes increasingly unhinged. Which is saying something, after all that has transpired these past three years.

Who wrote it? I did! Here. (Some nice photos, too.) Five months before the presidential election and seven months before Trump did indeed try to remain in office after losing.

Then in October 2024, just before the next election, I wrote about "The inherent fragility of democracy"; about democracy having the property of "autoimmunity." Which is to say democracy unavoidably, by its very nature, has the inherent ability to attack and even destroy itself, analogous to how autoimmune disease attacks the physical body.

Now here we are, having become in short order a shockingly lawless country, with a manifestly lawless president, a lawlessly indifferent Congress subservient to that president, and a lawless Supreme Court seemingly beholden to that president.

It can get worse, of course, and probably will. 

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Exactly who does have "the cards"? Not Russia.

In a June 12 piece in The Washington Post, Riley McCabe says Russia is "bleeding for inches" in Ukraine.

Russia has made only modest territorial gains (less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory) across the front lines over the past 18 months, but at an extraordinarily high price in men and equipment.

"These efforts have yielded fewer than 1,800 square miles of new territory seized since January 2024, an outcome that decisively falls short of Moscow’s objective to greatly expand its control of Ukrainian territory," McCabe writes. "Russian advances in some areas have been slower than Allied forces during the grueling World War I offensive in the Somme, a battle which became a byword for costly and futile military operations."

He continues: "For these marginal gains, Russia has paid an extraordinary price in blood and equipment. Russian fatalities in Ukraine now exceed the total number of Soviet and Russian soldiers killed in every war since World War II combined. By this summer, Russia will likely pass 1 million total military casualties." [link in the original -mb]

And this: "Russia has also consistently lost 2 to 5 times more fighting vehicles than Ukraine on the battlefield, including roughly 1,200 armored fighting vehicles, 3,200 infantry fighting vehicles and 1,900 tanks since January 2024."

Ukraine is well dug in and its positions fortified. This meat-grinding war of attrition "favors defenders and punishes attackers."

Russia's path to victory, then, is not through "battlefield brilliance" but rather "Western abandonment."

"Without U.S. support, Ukraine could quickly run short of critical munitions, fighting vehicles, air defenses and precision strike capabilities, giving Russian forces an advantage on the battlefield. The psychological blow of U.S. withdrawal could also shatter Ukrainian morale, accelerating collapse not through conquest, but through exhaustion."

Will that be how it plays out? The chances seem good. Ukraine no longer has a friend in the White House. Trump still has an affinity, perhaps even admiration, for Putin. At the G7 meeting in Calgary, Trump said that had Russia remained in the group, its 2022 invasion of Ukraine would have been averted. Recall that Russia was kicked out of the G8 in 2014 for ... invading Ukraine (it illegally annexed Crimea).

Trump beat up on Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in that infamous Oval Office mugging earlier this year, saying Ukraine better make a deal (meaning: cede a big chunk of its territory) because it "doesn't have the cards." By any objective measure, Russia is itself playing a pretty shitty hand.

I wrote three months ago that despite all the western angst, there's no urgency for the war to end now. It should only end when Ukraine says it should end. Our job is to robustly support Ukraine every step of the way. That serves Ukraine's interest in its own freedom, and our interest in containing Russia and ensuring a world order that refuses to accept wars of conquest.

Unfortunately, an always impatient Trump seems to have lost what little interest he may have had and, despite some grousing, his admiration of the thuggish Putin seems to have not much wavered. What a shame.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

Faith creates reality

 

Despite the sign's assertion, its owner is surely not claiming to know the mind of God regarding the 2020 election or, for that matter, anything else. How could he?

Rather, the owner is making a faith claim not about God, but about his own personal conviction, against all evidence, that Trump won. Invoking God gives that claim an unwarranted gloss of certainty, and inserts the election outcome into the domain of religion. A faith claim is necessary here, because there is overwhelming empirical evidence about who won, and it wasn't Trump.

If, contrary to evidence, and to the officially reported outcome, it was Trump who really (had all legal votes been counted and illegal ones rejected and "rigging" not occurred) won, God would surely know it, because God, being omniscient, knows the real winner, whoever it was. But there's no sense in which God endorses the claim being made. (I stipulate God's existence only for the sake of this particular discussion.)

Thus does the sign owner promote an alternative reality whose belief requires faith and eschews evidence, since the facts at hand utterly contradict his preferred reality.

Which aligns nicely with the practice of religion generally. Religion is, after all, at its core an assertion of faith-based "reality." Once the believer has learned to construct reality in this manner, belief in all sorts of propositions not based on facts readily follows. Such construction is one of religion's enduring intellectual perversities, and it utterly pervades the religious mind.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Waste, fraud, and abuse

Speaking of "abuse," what's abusive is the Trump administration's consistent misuse of language, which varies from highly misleading to downright Orwellian.

A March 7 Washington Post headline was: "DOGE redefines ‘fraud’ to defend cutting federal employees, programs." The article said Trump's recent speech to the nation "illustrated how Trump is trying to rally Americans behind Musk’s project to shrink the government — by attacking vast swaths of federal spending as fraudulent" when in fact they are no such thing. "Fraud" becomes a label attached to whatever you want to get rid of, as does "waste." The authoritarian playbook requires changing the meaning of words.

Or take "efficiency," as in "Department of Government Efficiency." DOGE isn't working to make government operations more efficient; only vastly smaller by pursuing a vicious anti-government ideology. That means cutting large swaths of services, on the one hand, and making many work less well, on the other. Doing the analysis to make a process more efficient is hard work. Hacking it indiscriminately is easy. In any case, a citizen who spends hours on hold with the Social Security Administration because DOGE laid off 7,000 of the agency's workers won't agree that his time is being used efficiently. One might even suspect the objective is to make the 90-year-old social insurance program less efficient in order to turn the public against it—the better to make huge cuts, or even eliminate it. Elon Musk called Social Security's inter-generational compact the "biggest Ponzi scheme ever."

As George Orwell warned long ago, the corruption of language, along with the flagrant misstatement of fact, is a necessary prerequisite to installing and maintaining an authoritarian and certainly totalitarian government. Authoritarians cannot exist without creating their own alternative realities.

Social Security is an excellent example of a pervasive alternative reality. Trump told the American people that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, which he concluded was either "fraudulent or incompetent." The actual number of 100 or older receiving benefits is 67,000, which according to demographers is about two-thirds of the centenarians living in the U.S., and thus a reasonable match for the demographic composition of the country. By sensible estimation one could conclude that the number of 100-year-old beneficiaries, far from fraudulent, looks to be about what one would expect.

Do you think calling Trump's language "Orwellian" is too strong? Consider that he called Ukraine's democratically elected president a "dictator," when in fact Putin, with whom Trump is now aligning, is the actual dictator. Trump said Ukraine started the war, when obviously Russia did, by invading its neighbor. These are 180-degree inversions of reality that Orwell would have recognized as emblematic of his thesis. That Trump's statements are ludicrous does not mean they won't be accepted as true by large numbers of people, which is why they're so dangerous.

Clearly, Trump's followers have a very high tolerance for alternative realities, as evidenced by the realization that even now tens of millions believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We can also presume that large numbers of people voted for Trump despite rejecting his stolen election claims. I find that particularly inexplicable and indeed odious in light of the profound threat Trump poses to the constitutional order. There's a palpable sickness in the country, both intellectual and moral, that's hard to fathom.

Surely incessant lying is an "abuse" of truth, which is the fundamental ground upon which all else depends. The abuse proceeds nonstop.

Consider Trump's continual and quite remarkable torrent of lies in the aftermath of the historic Los Angeles wildfires. When some hydrants ran dry, Trump claimed there was a water shortage caused by not allowing water to flow to the LA region from northern California. That is egregiously false. The reservoirs that supply LA were full. The problem was that the pumping and storage infrastructure was overwhelmed during the fires and could not keep up due to so many hydrants being open simultaneously, and large high elevation storage tanks being depleted (especially in Palisades). Simply put, the system lost pressure because of abnormally high demand.

"There's no shortage of water in Southern California," said one expert, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UC Davis, "but there was a shortage of water in the areas that had the fires because the storage they had locally in the neighborhoods, in the towns, was not enough for the event." By "storage" he meant the kinds of large elevated tanks that every municipal water system relies upon to maintain pressure. Such systems are designed to supply normal municipal needs, with some additional capacity for fighting a few large fires. But the massive scale of the fires overwhelmed the system, and it couldn't keep up.

The professor added that "the reason why they ran out of water was that the [fire] was much bigger than what the hydraulic systems in the local storage systems were designed for, even though the region, in California, has really quite a lot of water." [my italics -mb]

Bringing in more water from outside would have achieved nothing, but Trump nevertheless kept falsely blaming the state's water policies, in essence confusing the fire situation with a long running and unrelated dispute pitting agriculture against environmental considerations elsewhere in the state. On January 26 Trump ordered the federal government to override the state of California's water-management practices and laws to bolster firefighting efforts, directing the Bureau of Reclamation to deliver more water and hydropower through the Central Valley Project, a network of dams, canals and other infrastructure that supplies agricultural users and has nothing to do with Los Angeles. On January 28 he posted on Truth Social that "The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond."

There was no exercise of "emergency powers." (And by the way, emergency is another word that's being dreadfully abused, including to justify Trump's spasmodic application of tariffs on our closest friends and trading partners.) Within hours California's Department of Water Resources responded that "The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful." Nothing to see here.

Oh, and there is no water infrastructure connecting California to the "Pacific Northwest," as Trump claimed, much less "beyond." It does not exist, except in Trump's deranged mind.

On January 31 Trump lied that he finally solved the water problem, posting: "Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!"

What actually happened was that Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two federal dams supplying California’s Central Valley which, yet again, has no connection to Los Angeles, and which amounted to a gratuitous waste of water that will be needed later for crop irrigation, which is its primary intended purpose. According to the New York Times, "The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said."

The water releases came from reservoirs managed by the federal government that feed (along with state reservoirs) a vast agricultural irrigation network. The reservoirs store water from the winter wet season and release it during the agricultural growing season later in the year. Because of the need to maintain supplies for the summer, the only legitimate reason to release water during the winter is to ensure enough excess reservoir storage capacity to handle inflow from large winter storms in order to protect the dams. To state it yet again, the system he's irresponsibly playing with has nothing to do with Los Angeles or its fires. Trump just made it all up.

I belabor this because it demonstrates not just the kind of chattering falsehoods that Trump continually emits into reality's Geiger counter, but rather an elaborately constructed false narrative built on a sequence and assemblage of lies developed and expanded over a period of time inside a deranged mind, all constructing a completely fictitious version of a matter where empirical fact is quite unambiguous and easy to verify.

While California water is a useful case study, Trump's lies overall are too numerous to catalog. Last fall we had Trump and Vance claiming Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets, and that Venezuelan gangs were overrunning Aurora, Colorado. More recently Trump said falsely that China is operating the Panama Canal, as an excuse to justify his warning that "we're taking it back." The canal is sovereign Panamanian territory, and it's operated by Panama. A month ago Trump insinuated that DEI was to blame for the fatal DC plane crash that killed 67. Trump keeps saying the U.S. has given $350 billion in aid to Ukraine when the actual number is less than $200 billion. It goes on and on. You cannot take anything he says at face value. Indeed, a good rule of thumb would be to suppose that the opposite of whatever Trump says is the actual truth.

Such a torrent of lies can overwhelm the epistemological capacity of even a determined truth seeker which, alas, most people aren't. For its part, MAGA utterly lives in alternative realities continually fertilized by credulity and ignorance. As with the words we use to describe things, truth itself can cease to have meaning. When truth no longer holds, society comes apart. Corruption pervades government. (It's happening right now at massive scale.) The constitutional order collapses. All the originally false claims about government—waste, fraud, abuse—become actually real in the corrupt conduct of a government that is not beholden to fact. That is where we're headed. Maybe we've even arrived.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Dead people vote AND collect Social Security benefits

Mike Johnson: "What he's [Musk's] finding with his algorithms going through the data of the Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste and abuse."

Ted Cruz (who else?): "More than 13 million people on the records receiving benefits who are over 119 years old."

Leave it to Mike Johnson to incessantly insinuate falsehoods. And leave it to Ted Cruz to make the absurdity ("receiving benefits") explicit.

Actually, what "his" (Musk's) "algorithms" are finding is that "he" doesn't understand the data—which is a disturbing, recurring theme. The guy who's hacking up the government has no idea what he's doing.

So let me put all howling, hyperventilating, gullible right-wing minds at ease. A recent AP headline said, comfortingly, "Tens of millions of dead people are not getting Social Security checks, despite Trump and Musk claims."

Sorry, Ted.

Trump, of course, disagrees with the AP, and not just about the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Tuesday, Trump said at a press briefing in Florida that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent,” Trump added. [my italics -mb]

No, we don't. And they're not.

“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,” Trump said. He also said that there’s one person in the system listed as 360 years old. [my italics -mb]

Leave it to Trump to come up with a 360-year-old "listed" beneficiary. Bet that's a big hit in outraged yokeldom. (In a recent interview, David Brooks said our differences are "fundamentally about culture and respect." Sigh. How does one respect willful ignorance?)

Let's start with a high-level look. According to audits, Social Security's rate of "improper payments" (which would include paying dead people) from 2015 to 2022 was 0.83%. (That's $71.8 billion in improper payments divided by $8.6 trillion in total payments. If you don't do numbers, that's less than 1 percent.)

That rate is actually quite good. In the private sector, accounts payable errors tend to run a bit higher. 80% of companies that remit over 500 payments a month report an error rate of 1% or higher, and 44% of those had an error rate over 3%.

(And interestingly, especially if you think the private sector is the standard by which the government should be measured, life insurance fraud in the U.S. costs the insurance industry $10-20 billion annually. Fraud across all insurance sectors is estimated at $308 billion annually.)

Sure, Social Security's "improper payments" have a large (but not that large) absolute dollar value. How could they not? Social Security is the old-age social insurance program for the entire country with, as I said, $8.6 trillion in payments from 2015 to 2022. The "improper payments" (of every kind) annual average over that period was $7.2 billion—not quite chump change, but not earth shattering either, especially compared to the insurance industry figures I provided above. (If you want to go after real money, instead of gutting the IRS's enforcement arm, as is currently happening, empower it to pursue tax cheats as the previous administration was trying to do.)

According to a July 2024 inspector general's report, the vast majority of "improper payments" were not to deceased persons at all, but to living beneficiaries. But some minority were indeed dead. A November 2021 audit estimated that approximately $298 million (the horror!) in payments were issued to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries, and about $80 million of that was subsequently recovered.

If I may take editorial license at this point, it matters greatly which reality you live in, which is the fundamental theme in my epistemology. How can we properly govern ourselves if we don't know what's real?

Trump's reality is that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, whereas the actual number is 67,000. (Somehow Ted Cruz thinks there are 13 million alleged beneficiaries on the books who are over 119 years old and getting paid. Poor Ted.) 

According to demographers, there are approximately 101,000 centenarians living in the U.S. (Google says 90,000 as of 2021, but the number is growing rapidly.) So just two-thirds of persons age 100 or over are receiving Social Security benefits. I wonder: Why so few?

Trump said "if you take all of those millions of [dead] people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security." Translation: Because the fraud is so enormous, all you need to do to ensure Social Security's solvency is to quit paying dead people. It's as easy as that! Who knew? (To reiterate, the 2021 audit found 24,000 deceased beneficiaries at a cost of a couple of hundred million dollars in improper payments. Not quite enough dollars there to save Social Security, I'm afraid.)

Wouldn't it be nice if the president didn't spew ignorant nonsense? Alas, that's too much to ask.

As for Musk not understanding the data, he is multiply confused. Part of Musk's problem is that Social Security's ancient software is written in the COBOL programming language (which was on its way out when I took a course in it in 1984), which led to certain puzzling (to Musk) conventions in how the data is coded. Part of the problem is that Social Security doesn't have death records for a goodly number of people (which we shouldn't find surprising), but that doesn't mean they're receiving benefits, as Trump's acting commissioner recently noted. The system is coded in such a way that, when complete data is not available, it looks as if there are impossibly old (eg., 150-year-old) persons on the records, but in actuality nobody is sending "them" money. (Sorry, Ted.) Persons who know and work with the data understand what's going on. Musk doesn't. And by the way, the Social Security payment system is programmed to automatically stop sending payments to people when they reach 115 years old. (Sorry again, Ted.)

All this has been widely reported in recent weeks, with numerous debunkings of all the false claims. That didn't stop Trump from talking nonsense in his Tuesday night speech, or Mike Johnson disseminating disinformation as only he can.

Here's the thing. You have a choice of whether you live in a made-up reality, or the actual one. The persons running and ransacking our government live in a made-up reality. Which one do you live in?

 Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Why must the war end now?

Seemingly everybody from clear-eyed commentators to heads of state to Trump himself have insisted it's time for the Ukraine-Russia war to come to an end. But why?

Because the war has gone on for three years, and that's long enough? Because the cost in lives, devastation, and resources has been enormous?

Those aren't good reasons, not least because they're arbitrary, as if the timetable should account for our stock (or deficit) of patience. Or as if the suffering must end because we are decent, caring people who can't bear to observe it. Which, frankly, rings a bit phony to me anyway.

Indeed, the brutal destruction wrought by a vicious aggressor should steel our resolve, although putting it that way runs the risk of cheapening the real resolve before which we should stand in awe: namely, Ukraine's. By comparison, "our" resolve comes at such trifling cost and with almost no sacrifice.

That $200 billion of U.S. aid and arms is chump change compared to the geostrategic value it buys us. And again, saying that runs the risk of losing sight of the most important value, which is Ukraine's freedom, and our insistence on a world order that does not tolerate wars of conquest. 

The question of when the war should end is actually easy to answer: It should end when Ukraine says it should end, and on terms of Ukraine's choosing. If Ukraine wants to keep fighting, our job is to provide it the resources it needs. If Ukraine wants to negotiate a settlement, our job is to assist it to get the best deal that it can.

Honestly, that's not a very big ask of us.

Ukraine, and only Ukraine, can determine when and if its sacrifice has become too great, relative to what it thinks it can achieve. That's not for us to say, because it isn't our country being invaded, and our people being brutalized.

To arbitrarily stop now would be to reward the aggressor, which sends all the wrong messages and creates all the wrong incentives, and would be morally bankrupt.

Expectations are crucial. Russia needs to understand beyond all doubt that there will be no arbitrary end; that it will need to extract itself from the mess it has made, or keep on bleeding. Ukraine is said to be barely hanging on, but that observation applies to Russia too.

It's under-appreciated how much Russia's military has been decimated, and its economy ravished, by its war of conquest. Inflation is 10 percent. Interest rates are 21 percent. The economy is not in recession, but current low GDP growth is driven by war spending, which is considered to be unsustainable.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Russia's military has been devastated. Ukraine says it has destroyed 10,000 Russian tanks, which should be taken with a grain of salt. But western analysts put the number in the thousands. Common estimates are around 4,000 main battle tanks destroyed or captured, and 8,000 armored vehicles. The U.K. estimates Russia is able to produce around 100 new tanks per year. According to the Institute for the Study of War, "Russian forces have sustained vehicle and artillery system losses on the battlefield that are unsustainable in the medium- to long-term given the limitations of Russia's defense industrial capacity and Soviet-era weapons and equipment stocks."

(When considering U.S. aid so far to Ukraine, it's worth pointing out that, before the war, any analyst would have considered it a stunningly good bargain to deplete Russia's military capacity so severely at the cost of a mere $200 billion. Russia is an aggressive adversary, a threat to its neighbors, and to the international order. Its diminishment at that scale would have been viewed as a good thing.)

Russia has also suffered enormous battlefield casualties. Ukraine claims 850,000 Russian troops killed, captured, missing, or wounded. The U.K. puts the estimate at 790,000, and the U.S. over 700,000. Russia has suffered more dead, by some multiples, than all Americans killed in Vietnam.

In the recent Oval Office mugging of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Trump stressed Ukraine's recruitment difficulties—difficulties that are unsurprising after three years of all-out war. (The U.S. relied on a massive draft to fight WW II, and also the wars in Korea and Vietnam.) But Russia too is facing significant recruitment challenges. Recruitment is down to around 40 per day, from perhaps 250 per day in mid-2024. Russia has been losing an estimated 1,500 troops per day for the past three months. It's exhausted its prison population recruitment pool that supplied what can only be described as battlefield cannon fodder in the early going. Russia is increasingly turning to foreign nationals, criminals, and debtors to bolster troop numbers, and of course a sizable contingent of North Koreans. But its fighting strength is far below what it would like.

Given all that, Putin would be delighted to be extricated from his dismal predicament on favorable terms that allow him to keep a big chunk of Ukrainian territory. Which, to my great consternation, is exactly what President Trump seems to be angling towards. What a monumental travesty that would be. Trump is also moving towards re-normalization of relations between Russia and the U.S., which is simply bewildering. Trump has suggested that Russia be re-admitted to the G-7, for example. And he's moving to weaken or remove sanctions enforcement. These are all shockingly inappropriate moves that send exactly the wrong message to a thuggish aggressor.

Having the war drag on indefinitely would be very bad for Russia. That's why the West and the U.S. need to make it absolutely clear that their support for Ukraine will be robust, ongoing, and open-ended, with no arbitrary limits or timelines. Trump's style of Putin-coddling negotiation is highly inappropriate. Putin needs to know that not only will he not be bailed out, but his cost will be staggering if he chooses to keep fighting. That understanding will help shape whatever peace agreement finally emerges. (At the same time China will get the message that it needs to keep its hands off Taiwan.)

It's certainly true that some kind of negotiation will need to happen at some point. But it's for Ukraine, not us, to say when that needs to happen, and whether there should be a ceasefire or other concessions. Since the true cost of the war is being paid by Ukraine, and since its own freedom is at stake, only Ukraine can determine when the war should end. It really is that simple.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Apparently I live on a different planet than a lot of people

A Washington Post article said yesterday that "Some of the emerging [Trump administration] policies have been driven by backlash to the covid-19 response, after Trump made clear his disdain for the nation’s public health infrastructure. He and allies have said the U.S. approach to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates and school shutdowns, was heavy-handed, a position that some Democrats now share too."

Although that sentiment is nothing new, I continue be dumbfounded by the notion that the country's response to Covid, a once-in-a-century (we hope) pandemic, was "heavy-handed." There were almost 900,000 daily reported cases in January of 2022. There were 1.35 million cases reported on January 10 of that year. Daily hospitalizations peaked at around 163,000 that same month. Daily deaths were around 2,600. In January 2021, daily deaths were well over 3,000. A 9/11's worth of deaths. Every. Single. Day. The highest daily death count that month was 4,197.

In the U.S., more than 1.1 million people have died of Covid. During its rampage it became the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. Life expectancy in the U.S. declined by 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021.

So I remain flabbergasted by claims of over-reaction. By my lights, protecting the public from such catastrophic events is a vital role of the public health infrastructure, and of government. Many who disparage that role are apparently too stupid to realize they are likely alive today as a consequence of the government's "heavy-handedness."

But set that aside. The article also said "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was told Friday to lay off an estimated 10 percent of its staff, including nearly an entire class of “disease detectives” — the infectious-disease experts charged with helping spot the next epidemic." [Update: More recent reporting by the New York Times says the "disease detectives" are apparently being spared, but vast numbers of other public heath researchers and scientists are being summarily fired.]

Current serious public health concerns include the rising incidence of avian influenza, which some fear could become the world's next deadly pandemic. The disease has ravished egg laying flocks (it's why egg prices are so high), has been working its way through dairy cattle herds, and is increasingly infecting humans (one has died) that come into contact with those herds. Should the virus acquire the mutations needed to spread easily from person to person, it's off to the pandemic races.

There's more. "Global health leaders have warned about a new outbreak of Ebola virus in Uganda and other emerging outbreaks overseas," said the Post article.

And Trump's move to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization will hamper our ability to coordinate with other countries as diseases spread.

As an aside, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now confirmed as HHS secretary, has said the U.S. should pause infectious disease research for 10 years. Kennedy wants to concentrate instead of chronic diseases. Because of course we can't do both.

Also worth noting is that USAID, the world's largest foreign aid organization, has a large and crucial role in strengthening disease surveillance systems globally, particularly in developing countries. USAID, which Trump is in the process of shutting down, is vitally involved in detecting the emergence of the next pandemic.

Trump has also gratuitously announced he'll withhold federal aid from schools that have Covid mandates, which the Post notes is largely moot, since most such mandates were removed almost two years ago.

This is what passes for leadership now. But what right do I have to complain? We knew this was what we were getting, and chose it anyway.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.