No, really: It's now the "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts"

There are all kinds of coups. Here's one.

In an unprecedented move in February, Donald Trump fired 18 general trustees of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts (commonly known as the Kennedy Center) who had been appointed by President Biden.

The Kennedy Center, which is the national arts and culture institution, has a board of 36 general trustees, who are appointed by the U.S. president and who serve six-year terms, as specified by law. The board also has some ex-officio members, such as certain cabinet secretaries and holders of other offices. Presidents appoint new general trustees when the terms of existing trustees expire. Never before has a president dismissed trustees without cause or resignation prior to the completion of their terms. Now one has.

Trump replaced the fired Biden-appointed trustees with loyalists. He also appointed himself as one of the trustees. Board members who were appointees from Trump's first term were retained. Ex-officio members in Trump's cabinet were of course also loyal to Trump. Thus Trump gained control of the board. The newly constituted board fired Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter, and also elected Trump himself as board chairman to replace the previous chairman who had been one of the 18 fired by Trump.

Federal statute specifies the 6-year trustee terms. Whether or not the president can legally execute mid-term removals is a matter of dispute. While the law might not prohibit such removals, norms of conduct, historical precedent, and basic decency do prohibit them, but of course carry no legal weight. The notion that Trump would consider himself bound by norms of conduct and governance long ago became laughable.

(Example: As I write this Trump has ordered 30 ambassadors, all Biden appointees, to leave their diplomatic posts around the world and return home. Basically, they've been fired. These are career diplomats. "A standard tour is three to four years," said the New York Times. "The union representing career diplomats said this was the first time that such a mass recall had taken place of career diplomats serving as ambassadors or chiefs of mission." A union spokeswoman said the method of removal was "highly irregular." Which is to say, an egregious violation of norms.)

Once the dust had settled at the Kennedy Center, Trump had a compliant board of which he himself was chairman, and a compliant president of his choosing. He then proceeded to overhaul the Kennedy Center's programming, which he declared had been too woke. Trump himself had never attended a Kennedy Center performance, not even the annual Kennedy Center Honors gala, which by tradition U.S. presidents have attended. "Prior to 2017," says Wikipedia, "there had been three occasions in which the president did not attend the gala performance [due to pressing matters of state -mb]."

The Kennedy Center was conceived in the Eisenhower years as the country's "national cultural center." Authorized by the National Cultural Center Act of 1958, and opened in 1971, the Center has hosted, according to Wikipedia, "many different genres of performance art, such as theater, dance, classical music, jazz, pop, psychedelic, and folk music. It is the official residence of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera." It is sustained mainly through ticket sales and private donations. The federal government pays for building upkeep. The building is administered as a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution.

Since Trump's takeover, the Kennedy Center’s 2025 season has been turbulent, more politicized, and financially weaker than in prior years. Ticket sales and subscriptions have declined, several major artists and productions have withdrawn, and the programming mix has shifted away from some of the more progressive and experimental work that characterized recent seasons. There were waves of staff firings and resignations.

According to The Washington Post, fired president Deborah Rutter had led the Center "through a decade in which it had diversified its offerings, endured the 2020 lockdown and emerged to boast robust ticket sales and, according to publicly available tax filings, steadily grown revenue."

Previously the Center's board had been decidedly bipartisan and apolitical, with a genuine mission to promote the arts as broadly conceived. No more. It's now dominated by Trump loyalists. "Nearly 10 months in," says The Post, "a picture of a transformed institution has come into view. Standbys of the Kennedy Center’s stages like the National Symphony Orchestra have been strained by plummeting ticket sales and organizational uncertainty. Traveling productions and acts have pulled out. And a new kind of right-leaning programming has begun to take root." [links in the original]

The building has gotten an imperial Trumpian makeover too, with new marble (of course) and portraits of the first and second couples hanging in the Center's Hall of Nations. Performance themes are less diverse and artistic, and more patriotic. Trump, says The Post, "routinely refers to the building as 'the Trump Kennedy Center.'"

This year Trump chose himself to host the Kennedy Center Honors, the building’s marquee annual event. He also chose the honorees. "All went through me," Trump said.

Originally named in its authorizing legislation the "National Cultural Center," the Center was renamed the "John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" in 1964, following the assassination of President Kennedy. President Lyndon Johnson signed the joint resolution renaming it as a living memorial to the slain president, who had supported the center's development through fundraising efforts.

A living memorial. Never one to miss an opportunity to profane the sacred, the always self-aggrandizing Trump has recently bigfooted himself into the Center's formal name. The Center's loyalist board voted on December 18 to rename the storied institution the "The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts," a.k.a. the "Trump Kennedy Center." Because the previous name had the force of law, the board has no legal authority to change it. No matter. The Kennedy Center began updating signage on the exterior of the building the following day. The coup was complete.

We should of course not be surprised by Trump's vainglorious self-exaltation, in this or anything else, because it's long been on continuous display. This is the man who has heavily lobbied without embarrassment for himself to receive the Nobel Peace Price, which is itself surely a moral disqualification. Not achieving that, the U.S. Institute of Peace building in Washington, D.C., became the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, announced by the State Department shortly after Trump's Nobel advocacy. According to PBS, "the takeover of the Peace Institute was also anything but peaceful, with his administration seizing the independent entity and ousting its board before actually affixing his name to the building." Sound familiar? Independent entity. Illegal or improper board ouster. Trump takeover and renaming.

Trump has also been long interested in his face appearing on Mount Rushmore, which (thankfully) is almost certainly physically impossible due to geological considerations.

The examples are almost endless. Trump has just announced the construction of a new "Trump class" of naval warships. 

As I'm writing this, a New York Times headline says "Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level."

"Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch," writes Peter Baker of the Times.

"He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term," says Baker. "Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court." [links and italics in the original]

All this is reminiscent of authoritarian regimes elsewhere, where government is equated with the cult of the leader. In America, we used to believe that we were different, profoundly so. A nation of laws, not men. No ubiquitous portraits of presidents gazing down on us from buildings and billboards, and attaching their names to our institutions even during their tenure in power. We were a different kind of country. A beacon of possibility.

I'm reminded, too, of how it was in the 1990s and early 2000s when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister of Italy. Back then I imagined the utter embarrassment that country must have felt at being ruled by such a self-evident buffoon. I could never have anticipated that such buffoonery could claim the American presidency, with all its assumptions of competence, dignity, and decency rising in this office above human shortcomings.

Yet here we are.

We have found to our surprise and dismay how much our institutions have depended on fidelity to norms that everybody more or less implicitly agreed  to follow (although Mitch McConnell also busted a number of important norms).

Before now we have in very large part not needed to legally specify every minute detail in statute in a way that explicitly anticipates and defends against presidents who act in continuous bad faith. When the law says trustees are appointed to six year terms, we should be able to assume that, barring something extraordinary, they serve six year terms. We ought not even have to argue about whether the specification of term lengths in the statute itself implies that a president cannot normally interrupt those terms. But now we do, thanks to Donald J. Trump. The combination of a rogue president, a compliant Congress, and an enabling Supreme Court has done much damage to our system of governance.

Will that damage endure? The development of an imperial presidency has turned our country's founding principles upside down. What remains is to wonder whether we will learn from this dismal experience and somehow reaffirm and renew our earlier commitments to constitutional governance, the rule of law, and—not least—basic character and decency. Whether or not that happens ultimately depends upon an informed and engaged citizenry. Us. I'm sorry to say that I'm not very hopeful. 

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

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I have a book

I've recently published a book. It's available on Amazon.

The book's title is Does It Hurt To Think about Climate? The subtitle is Essays on Global Warming. It's a collection of essays from this blog, with some updates and some additional material.

It would be my great honor for you to own a copy, but I'm a little dismayed and embarrassed by the price. I set it as low as Amazon would allow, which means no proceeds go to me. That's fine. I never intended to make money from this project.

The reason for the high price is I opted for white paper and premium color ink—the most expensive combination. Cream paper, and black or standard color ink, were also available and would have been far cheaper. My choice was motivated by a couple of color photographs and some color graphics that I wanted to reproduce as well as possible. I'm quite pleased with the overall production quality.

Publishing a book on Amazon KDP was an interesting experience, with a somewhat steep learning curve. There were lots of little details to sweat to get everything just right. I estimate I spent 80 hours with design and preparation of the manuscript plus design of the cover. For the cover I used a couple of colors that appear on the blog.

For paperbacks such as mine, Amazon keeps 40% of the listed price to cover its site selling overhead and its profit. The remaining 60% covers actual printing costs and, if any is left over, author royalty. The printing costs on my book are $11.27 per copy, which eats up the entire 60%. Yikes.

The link above is for Amazon.com in the U.S. market. The book is also available in certain other Amazon marketplaces: 

Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Germany,

Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland

 

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Does he actually believe it, or is he just bullshitting?

Donald Trump has said on multiple occasions that each (alleged) drug smuggling boat destroyed off the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 American lives. Does he really believe that, or is he just bullshitting? And which—the believing or the bullshitting—would be worse?

As of early December, the U.S. has destroyed around 22 such boats, killing over 80 persons. Do the math: 22 x 25,000 = 550,000 lives saved.

Official estimates put the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. at around 105,000 (actually now a lot less) annually. So Trump's 3-month boat-destroying campaign has already saved five times as many lives—over half a million—as are lost to drug overdoses in a year.

Which is a truly impressive accomplishment.

The majority of U.S. drug deaths are caused by fentanyl overdose. Trump himself has long decried the problem of illicit fentanyl. He even used the minuscule amounts coming into the country from Canada as a nonsensical excuse for tariffs on that country. Most fentanyl entering the U.S. is produced in Mexico from chemical precursors produced in Asia, and then smuggled across the southern border.

Venezuela is not a fentanyl-producing or fentanyl-trafficking country. It is a transit country for, but not a primary producer of, cocaine. Most cocaine is produced in Columbia, an ostensible sometimes ally of the U.S. Some is also produced in Peru and Bolivia. Because of its geographic location, Venezuela is well positioned to export cocaine out of South America. But most of the cocaine exported through Venezuela to the Caribbean route is destined for Europe, not the U.S. Cocaine bound for the U.S. more commonly travels via Pacific/Eastern Pacific and Central American routes that bypass Venezuela.

To restate it succinctly, the claim of 25,000 lives saved is on its face absurd. The drug possibly (no evidence has ever been produced) being interdicted, cocaine, isn't the one that causes most U.S. deaths. And Venezuela and the Caribbean aren't the transit routes for U.S. bound cocaine but rather for Europe bound cocaine.

So I ask again: Does Trump really believe his 25,000 lives saved claim, or is the president of the United States just bullshitting? And again, which would be worse?

The incongruities abound, and and go beyond what I've already laid out. If Trump is concerned about cocaine, then his primary focus should be Columbia, not Venezuela. The U.S. has had an often-strained relationship with Columbia. In September, the U.S. decertified the country as a cooperating partner in counter-narcotics efforts.

If instead Trump is primarily concerned about fentanyl, as he has said many times in the past, and long before he became fixated on Venezuela, then his efforts should be directed at Mexico. Obviously there are difficulties and delicacies with this, but that is nevertheless the reality.

Other incongruities: You don't hear so much about the southern border wall as you used to, but it's worth mentioning while we're on the subject of drug smuggling that the long-held belief that the border wall would impede the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. is also patently false. Most of the drugs being smuggled across the southern border are hidden in vehicles passing through legal ports of entry. And most of that smuggling activity is conducted by U.S. citizens who go back and forth across the border frequently, and probably just want to make some extra money. So the drug/border wall connection was always bogus. I mention this to demonstrate how messed up our grasp of reality tends to be, and how we can't have intelligent policy conversations because many of us, including our president and politicians, don't know what's real.

One more complaint. The Trump administration refers to the Venezuelan drug runners as narco-terrorists. They are no such thing. Misappropriation of the word "terrorist" (which I've written about previously) is an egregious tendency of certain governments, usually in order to justify their own autocratic proclivities and actions. Simply put, terrorists want to terrorize, such as with attacks on civilians, suicide bombings, and flying airplanes into buildings. They terrorize with political intent, such as to compel attention to their cause, or to demand remedy of an injustice, or to fight an oppressor. Drug cartels, by contrast, are operating businesses, albeit illegal ones that cause much harm and suffering. Nonetheless, their intent is not to terrorize the populace, but rather to make money. The distinction is crucial. Not making it is another way we loosen our grip on reality, and poison the national polity.

Back to bullshitting. We ought to be able to expect that our president, at least, knows what's real, and accurately conveys that reality to the American people. It often appears that Trump genuinely does not, or at least doesn't care. The not caring is a definition of bullshitting, where the intention is less to knowingly lie (although Trump does plenty of that) than to assert whatever nonsense pops into his head, without any grasp of or concern about the underlying facts, whatever they may be. 

Trump has had an extraordinarily long bullshitting career, going back decades. That propensity has been plainly obvious to any intelligent observer. And yet he twice won election to the presidency. That says a lot about us. And so Americans gave gotten what they deserve, with dismaying results. This is no way to make a country great, or even to maintain a semblance of past greatness.

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

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Redheads are murderers and rapists

Which is true, but incomplete. Redheads are not just murderers and rapists; they're also terrorists, spies, insane asylum escapees, and drug smugglers. And more.

It's beyond me why we'd tolerate their presence in our country. I say get 'em out.

Immigrants, too, are murderers, rapists, terrorists, spies, insane asylum escapees, and drug smugglers—which should be clear to anybody who's paying attention.

Afghan immigrants might be the worst. You want proof? Recently an Afghan immigrant who had been granted asylum shot two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. One is dead and one remains in critical condition. What more evidence do you need?

It also demonstrates the ingratitude of these people.

Donald Trump said he wasn't blaming all Afghans for the shooting, but he said "there’s a lot of problems with Afghans." That should be obvious.

"Many of these people are criminals, many of these people are people that shouldn’t be here," Trump said, alluding to the chaotic evacuation of Afghans during the U.S. withdrawal from the country in 2021. And yet that incompetent Biden let them in. Now look what's happened.

Reporters pointed out that the Afghan who shot the two guard troops had worked for the CIA, and had been vetted. "He went cuckoo," Trump said. "I mean, he went nuts."

And isn't that the point? No amount of vetting will protect the country from rogue immigrants. The answer is to just not let them in. None of them. They're not worth the risk. They bring crime. They bring disease. Hell, they eat peoples' pets. Think how much safer, cleaner, nicer this country would be if we kept immigrants out.

Trump used the D.C. shooting as reason to say he'd "permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries" and denaturalize migrants "who undermine domestic tranquillity." Good for him. But for immigrants, especially third world immigrants, this would be an amazingly tranquil country. We have to get this situation under control.

Homeland Security secretary Krisi Noem gets it. After the D.C. shooting she recommended a travel ban "on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies." Amen.

Trump reiterated what he's been saying almost forever. "Many of these people are criminals, many of these people are people that shouldn’t be here." He gave as an example, if you need one, that a large influx of Somali refugees is "taking over" Minnesota, bringing gang violence.

Last year Trump warned that the notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, is taking over Aurora, Colorado. He was right on both counts. The D.C. shooting is all the proof you need.

Somalis now make up slightly more than one percent of Minnesota's population. That statistic should send a chill down your spine.

It is true that undocumented Hispanics make up far more, a whopping six percent of Texas's population. But at least those people are brown, not black, and they clean peoples' homes. Black immigrants are worse. Black Muslim immigrants are the worst of all.

Immigrant violence was a big theme at last year's Republican National Convention. Ted Cruz gave a moving speech memorializing Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, and Kate Steinle—all white women murdered by immigrants. Consider the names of the murderers: Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez. José Antonio Ibarra. José Inez García Zárate. 'Nuf said.

From the RNC we learned that not only are immigrants murderers and rapists, as Trump has long pointed out, but they're also coming to the country to vote illegally. They're smuggling in drugs. And they're coming for your jobs. A soup-to-nuts pestilence.

All of this should be self-evident. It's easy to see that this country would be far, far better without these people.

Which brings me back to redheads. Immigrants are getting a lot of the recent attention, and rightly so. But redheads are a real problem too. Can you really doubt that it would be trivially easy to find a redhead who had committed each of the kinds of crimes I have just described? Can you?

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

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

On the economy, Trump says he "inherited a mess"

Donald Trump recently said this of Argentina's president, Javier Milei: "He, like us, inherited a mess." Argentina faces persistent economic challenges, including slow growth, very high inflation, and financial instability. The U.S. is bolstering the Argentine peso with a recently announced $20 billion currency swap.

Yes indeed, Donald Trump inherited an economic mess. How big a mess was it?

On October 19, 2024, in the waning months of the Biden administration, The Economist produced a special issue with the headline "The envy of the world."

"The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust," proclaimed one of the issue's headlines. Another was "American productivity still leads the world." A third was "What can stop the American economy now?"

This was just a couple of weeks before the presidential election. After Trump took office we have been getting a pretty good sense of what could stop the American economy.

The "mess" that Trump says he "inherited" included declining inflation. As Trump took office, inflation was slightly above the Fed's target, but was on a downward trajectory. The Fed accordingly cut interest rates three times in 2024, by a total of one point. Recall that prices had soared a few years earlier as a consequence of pandemic-related supply chain issues, but had been steadily falling since then under the Fed's monetary supervision.

As Trump was being sworn in, Biden had created two million jobs in 2024, for a monthly average of more than 167,000. He created 16.1 million jobs over his four years in office, a feat unmatched by any other American president in history. That's a jaw-dropping monthly average of 336,000. Over four years.

That was the mess that Trump inherited.

In point of fact, the U.S. led the world in the post-pandemic economic recovery during Biden's presidency. That was the endowment bequeathed to Trump. So what has he done with it? He created a total of 487,000 jobs in his first seven months. That's a monthly average of just 70,000. The unemployment rate has risen from 4.0 percent in January to 4.3 percent now. The inflation rate has bottomed out and is now edging higher once again. Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs that are already causing consumer prices to rise, and we're just in the early stage. It will get worse.

According to The Hill, a new Goldman Sachs analysis says that American consumers will pay 55 percent of the tariff cost this year. American businesses will eat 22 percent of those costs, and foreign exporters will eat 18 percent. Tariffs are an extremely regressive tax on consumers, because low and middle income persons pay a far higher proportion of their income on such taxes than do rich persons. The Yale Budget Lab estimates the short-run price increase from tariffs at 1.7%, which represents a $2,400 annual average cost per household.

The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by approximately 10 to 11 percent during Trump's second term so far. This decline is the steepest for the first half of a year since 1973. The drop reflects a weakening dollar against a basket of major currencies, including the Euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Canadian dollar, Swedish krona, and Swiss franc. Whatever your opinion about this—Trump actually wants a weaker dollar—it does represent less buying power for U.S. consumers at a time when prices are already rising for other reasons. Reasons for the dollar decline include uncertainty over Trump's chaotic and frequently shifting policies (especially on tariffs), plus the large debt increases baked into Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" that overwhelmingly benefits the rich. Other concerns include Trump's meddling with the Federal Reserve. All these factors make investors jittery and less inclined to hold dollar-denominated assets than they otherwise would be.

And whatever you think of Trump's immigration policy (which Pope Leo recently suggested involves "inhuman treatment of immigrants"), mass deportations undeniably make the economy smaller by removing both workers and consumers.

Trump has always made assertions about the economy that are untethered from reality—assertions that aggrandize his own imagined accomplishments and deflect blame from his failures. He would have you believe that bad things are thrown into his lap and he heroically fixes them in unprecedented fashion. His "inherited mess" excuse is more of the same. In February 2019 I wrote of the absurdity of Trump's claiming he had launched an "economic miracle" (Trump's words). Not only did Obama consistently create more jobs than Trump, but GDP growth during Trump's first term was quite unspectacular as well, approximately matching Obama's second term performance. (I wrote several times about job creation during Trump's first term. Here's a summary.)

Indeed, Trump's first term was basically a continuation of Obama's economy, except Trump created far fewer jobs, and I'm not even counting the massive Covid-related job losses in Trump's final year. One way of observing that there was no Trump "miracle" is to consider a graph of the unemployment rate since 2010. Note the steady decline under Obama's two terms from high financial crisis levels. (And indeed, it was Obama who truly inherited a mess, with job losses of 800,000 per month when he was sworn in.) The rate flattened slightly under Trump, but the very long term trend continued. Contrary to his claim that he did something amazing, Trump actually got in at the end of one of the longest economic expansions in U.S. history.

There was no Trump miracle. Never was. But to accept that you have to live in the reality that is, not the one in Trump's mind.

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

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

 

 

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, 2024 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 or demagogue, 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.