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Tarnished age redux [1]

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Date: 2025-04-24

I knew yesterday when I wrote and posted a piece on the gilded age now better titled as the tarnished age, that there was so much more to explore but didn't want to turn an article into a lengthy chapter. So, I'm back.

First, a huge shout-out to Rachel Maddow, who has made this second piece so very much easier. Her show last night (which I always catch on YouTube around 5 am or so because I canceled Fios streaming) touched on so many of the things I wanted to get to in a second piece and without all the research and refreshing of memory that would have been required. Gonna miss her nightly show when she steps away after 5/5/25.

First we have to go back to the beginning of this awful presidency, starting the very day after inauguration, which feels like it was 20 years ago, instead of not even 100 days. And all of us are now old enough to remember it, am I right?

First among the early executive orders was the one that froze all loans and research grants. All of them. (Which had then to be rescinded with a quiet oops.) This would have set our country back years, even decades in the competitive world of all manner of research. It still may if there is a return to this anti-research, anti-intellectual policy.

And early on, remember what he allowed Musk to do? Eradicate USAID? Today there are multiple reports of the deaths of infants, children and mothers. From starvation or from AIDS due to the food and medicine being withheld from everywhere in the world, and in particular, from the most vulnerable of our fellow human beings living in Africa. One current estimate regarded as credible is that 20 million children and adults will die in the next decade of either AIDS or starvation. This estimate actually seems quite conservative if this intentional cruelty isn't stepped back.

Then, for some unknown reason, all the funding for Ebola prevention measures was eliminated. Another huge oops followed by reinstatement. For now.

At Musk's issuance of a dictum, the Agriculture Department fired all of the scientists working on the bird flu that is currently wiping out our poultry and egg-laying flocks in the United States. Another oops, reinstatement, but again, for how long and how many of those scientists even agreed to return to their microscopes? As the bird flu is a zoonotic virus, it will if not arrested make its way to all of us just as Covid did.

The plan to destroy all of the government's stockpile of Covid tests. All of them, at a cost to the taxpayers of 500 million of our dollars. Because if you don't test, you don't find covid. Remember that one from the pandemic?

Killing off the 9/11 first responders' programs, the ones that helped us track the multiple health threats to them since the towers came down. Rescinded. For now. But only after thousands of Americans screamed bloody murder.

Brutal cuts to the VA. Including for vets' cancer treatments and other medical services. But get this, then the meanness of cutting their burial services funds as well.

Life-threatening release in an unclassified email of the names of thousands of CIA officers. Many of them of course undercover. But not any longer.

Then more tarnishing of our decency--the Trump administration cut off all new-hire funds for the veterans' hotline, the one that works to keep vets from committing suicide or harming others.

Firing all the employees at our Nuclear Regulatory Agency. Huge oops. These folks are responsible for all things nuclear, including power plants but also our nuclear stockpile. And then after realizing what they'd done, there was a cavalier, oh, we didn't mean it, come back to work. But the problem was that there was no way to reach these highly trained, experienced folks. Oops.

And our nation's meteorologists? Gone, many of them from the National Weather Service because, why not? Shoot, they only predict weather disasters before they destroy entire regions and cost us thousands of lives. The greatest number of these cuts though are in the states most vulnerable to tornadoes and hurricanes. What could possibly go wrong?

The firing of anyone in our military who is either female or black if they held a high command. Because of course they were merely DEI hires. The hundreds of years of experience and training are gone and we are at higher risk as a result. While we're talking about the military, let's not forget the purging of other DEI "offenses"---including the library as an example at our Naval Academy. Four hundred books.

Attempting to coerce law firms, media entities and universities. As well as our elementary and secondary schools. To do the administration's bidding, to end coverage of topics and issues Trump doesn't like, to end all teaching, research and selection of students not deemed desirable by both Project 2025 and the administration itself. This is a big and dangerous one--and we need only dig a bit into the history of Cambodia under Pol Pot to find out what happened to the people of Cambodia after their educational institutions, including especially teachers and professors, were killed off or bent to his regime's will. They lost their culture, their history and their knowledge base. In under 10 years.

The use of an unrestricted platform, Signal chat, to discuss war plans in almost real time. And then to do it again the same day with the Defense Secretary's wife and brother. Classified information that in the wrong hands could have gotten our fighter jets blown out of the sky. Callous disregard for our own men and women in uniform tarnishes everything we've worked hard to restore after the national schism caused by Vietnam.

The tarnishing of our Constitution in ways too many to set out here. Just one then: the ongoing attempts to completely trash and end all due process under our laws. All of it. When the due process rights of those men grabbed up and sent to El Salvador are eliminated, so goes that right for the rest of us. Not my opinion---that of Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard, Marc Elias of Democracy Docket, Glenn Kirschner of Justice Matters, and too many others to mention.

The tariff debacle that has already isolated and alienated our country from almost the entire world; and crashed our financial markets several times in only the last few weeks. The scandals likely to be uncovered of insider trading and the loss of trust this creates among all Americans that our financial lives are safe also must be on the table.

Myriad attempts to turn back or downright end civil rights of every kind--decades of progress hard fought for is under existential threat. Civil rights for African Americans; LGBTQ+; women; ethnic minorities; religious minorities; and the beat goes on and on and on. And while we’re at it, voting rights. Suppression of the right to vote mandated by our Constitution and the amendments that broadened that right.

Among the worst of the actions of the last fewer than 100 days just may be what this administration is doing to Ukraine. We were allies. As were all the NATO countries. And now we are not trusted as far as our allies could throw us metaphorically. To have destroyed in so few days what it took almost 80 years to build has tarnished our country perhaps irretrievably and irrevocably. We are becoming a pariah state. Like Russia and North Korea. And the question remains: why? Why would any administration, any president, willfully choose to do this to what had been among the greatest nations on earth. Why?

The last question is naturally rhetorical--at least at this point. But it does seem that there is an answer--we just haven't uncovered it yet. And if we do, this may be the answer that doesn't merely encompass a tarnished age but may end the United States as a democracy once and for all.

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