Illiteracy
Only 1,314 days to go...
“We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years." ~ Benjamin Haddad, French Europe Minister
One of my happier moments in childhood was the day my mom took me to the public library to get a children’s library card. While we had a number of Little Golden Books in our home, being able to check out real books like Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey or Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans was so exciting. On a regular basis, Mother would take us to the library. She would check out the books she wanted to read, while my brother and I would check out the ones we wanted.
Both of my parents were really big on learning. They both believed that getting a college education was important and they were both voracious readers. They were also incredibly well-informed. They read at least two newspapers a day and religiously watched the PBS News Hour in the evenings.
They were lifelong learners and pretty serious about it. I realized in their later years, that I should never call their home when Charlie Rose was on TV because, my mother loved his show and watched it every weeknight. If I called, she would hang up on me telling me to call back later. If there was an author on the show and the book sounded interesting, she’d rush out, get it, read it and talk about it to anybody who would listen!
And my dad, who really didn’t enjoy following sports at all and never watched any games on TV, spent much of his time studying things on his computer. When he was 90 and living in his continuing care facility, the chaplain decided to have a NCAA March Madness Pool with the residents, so Dad decided to join the pool. He spent hours reading, trying to figure out how to arrange his bracket. Here was a man, who had never really watched any basketball games, reading up on each of the college teams and their coaching staff. He was rather pleased, when he came in 3rd in the pool.
Like I said, they were both lifelong learners.
Watching them and growing up in that environment wore off on my sibs and me. My brother reads constantly — I have trouble keeping up with all that he reads. My sister is probably the most curious person I know. The values that our parents instilled in us were to learn, to stay curious, and to spend time with smart people, who can constantly challenge us to learn more. Learning and good judgement were expected of us. Neither of our parents were particularly amused, when we did stupid, illogical or irrational things.
I suppose that is why I am so appalled by the utter stupidity of this administration. They seem to be promoting illiteracy at every turn by destroying knowledge institutions.
Knowledge institutions – including universities, the truth-oriented press, government offices with data collection or scientific responsibilities – are crucial for constitutional democracies. They have as a central mission the search for truth or better understandings, through independent application of disciplinary or professional standards of reliability. Without free discussion based on knowledge, the democratically legitimating role of public participation in elections and policy processes declines. Elections become less meaningful indicators of public views; public checks on poor policy choices, or abusive or corrupt governance, dwindle. A constitutional democracy is committed to the rule of law and the equal protection of rights – to which ends the public must be able to know what the laws are, what their rights are, how to protect those rights, and how well the legal system is functioning. The exercise of rights – whether individually or by organizations – will often depend on a foundation of informed choice.
Just consider some of their actions during the last 5 months:
Trump has launched a campaign of executive actions and public threats aimed at elite academic institutions—including Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania - All the ways the Trump administration is going after colleges and universities:
Withholding federal funding
Restricting international students
Threatening accreditation
Threatening nonprofit status
Taxing college endowments
The Department of Education has a congressionally-mandated responsibility to ensure the best education for all children — this included ensure that students with disabilities, that educational equity is upheld for children, that religious freedom is protected, and other mandates. Trump refuses to accept this mandate. Instead, he wants to dismantle the ED — undermining its ability to safeguard these critical protections — and weaponizing the department to carry out a deeply unpopular political agenda. Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more
Trump wants to dismantle Head Start. The Head Start program was designed to provide comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. Early childhood experiences are crucial because they lay the foundation for a child's cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development.
Trump issued executive orders halting nearly all federal grants, including those funding public health, education, small businesses, and infrastructure projects. This caused deep disruptions across nearly every sector of the economy—temporarily stalling funding for everything from infrastructure projects to lifesaving medical research at St. Jude, UTHSC, and other institutions, and more.
All 12 board members of the Fulbright Program, a prestigious international educational exchange program, resigned over what they described as political interference from the Trump administration. The board alleged that the State Department denied awards to a “substantial number” of people already selected to receive a scholarship and is reviewing applications for 1,200 recipients who had been approved by the board. The board said it approved its applications in the winter but learned that the Trump administration was sending rejection letters based on research topics.
Trump has withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), cutting off U.S. funding for global health initiatives, including pandemic preparedness, vaccine distribution, and disease eradication programs. The decision immediately jeopardized global efforts to combat infectious diseases and undermined international health cooperation.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently fired the leaders of the National Intelligence Council because it dared to produce accurate information the president didn’t like. That coincided with reports of a Trump appointee trying to politicize intelligence, the White House moving forward with a “major downsizing” at U.S. intelligence agencies, and the president’s recent decision to fire the leadership of the National Security Agency, a key intelligence gathering department, as well as the National Security Council’s director for intelligence.
But perhaps most important is the fact that Trump tends to ignore intelligence briefings and reports, and Gabbard is exploring new ways to “revamp” his intelligence briefings in order to bring them in line with “how he likes to consume information.”
RFK Jr. Replaces Vaccine Advisory Panel. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday named eight doctors and researchers, including four who have spoken out against vaccination in some way, to replace roughly half the members he fired from an expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Get Ready to Die of a Preventable Disease: RFK Jr. Fires Every Vaccine Expert on CDC Panel
In an apparent attempt to dismantle Climate.gov, a major United States government website that supports climate science education, the Trump administration has fired all of its content production staff. The website is a gateway to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate Program Office. (You can read more about NOAA at my post, Which way is the wind blowing?)
Trump abruptly fired Carla Hayden as the Librarian of Congress and then moved to put Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer who is now at the Justice Department, in her place.
The administration has significantly reduced funding for Pell Grants and other federal student aid programs, making it harder for low-income students to afford higher education.
The adminstration reduced funds that support grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for indirect expenses. The administration is limiting indirect expenses to 15% of the grant, a move that will cause layoffs, suspend clinical trials, and delay progress on groundbreaking research.
Trump took over control of the Kennedy Center board. He terminated multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share “his” Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.
I have already written about how the Department of Defense wants to rewrite the history of the military in Erasing History.
And we all know how the Secretary of Homeland Security doesn’t even understand the basic principle of Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus in the United States pre-dates our Constitution.
I could go on and on. There are so many egregious actions by this president to dumb-down Americans and promote illiteracy. Democracy requires an informed citizenry. As I wrote in Dumb and Dumber:
“A democracy can really only function effectively when its citizens are capable of understanding issues and making rational decisions. If people vote emotionally or irrationally, democracy becomes vulnerable to demagoguery, populism, and authoritarianism.”
This dumbing down of America is so tragic.
But I suppose — what can you expect from The President Who Doesn’t Read.
“It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.” ~Gary Cohn
Thought for the day in honor of his birthday…
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
~ Adam Smith
Must Read Articles:
Trump Is Killing American Innovation And China Will Reap the Benefits
Over the last few months, an elaborate plan to ensure China prevails in the global economic competition has taken shape. The plan’s chief architects, however, are not China’s leaders—they are U.S. politicians. The Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies are undermining the United States’ ability to innovate, the driver of its economic growth. Hostile immigration policies are making it harder for U.S. firms, industries, and universities to attract the best ideas and talent from around the world and leverage them to boost America’s prosperity. Wild threats of tariffs and restrictions on foreign supply chains are terrifying investors, who are beginning to sit on their capital and look for new opportunities away from the chaos. China, meanwhile, is becoming more competitive in the very fields the United States is kneecapping…Every area of future economic growth in which the United States is poised to lead—such as software, AI, oil and gas drilling, robotics, and electric vehicle production—depends on innovations that are impossible to nurture without reliable long-term support from the federal government. Both U.S. political parties once saw public investment in scientific education, training, and innovation as central to the country’s future prosperity.
The great poaching: America's brain drain begins
U.S. researchers' fears are coming true. America’s science pipeline is drying up, and countries like China are seizing the opportunity to surge ahead.
Quotes of the day:
“A school is more than just a place of learning. It is a space of trust, of security, of the future. The fact that this safe space was shattered by such an act of violence leaves us speechless.” ~Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker
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“Trump and his appointees do not understand this country’s real strengths. If they did, they would not attempt to destroy the great research universities that have done so much to create the scientific base that has been indispensable to America’s military power. They do not know, because they are exceptionally ill-informed, that it was the mobilization of scientific personnel from America’s universities by Vannevar Bush (of MIT) and James B. Conant (president of Harvard) that helped give the United States its technological edge during World War II.” ~Eliot A. Cohen
What I’m reading today…
It’s a Really Bad Time to Be an Expert in Washington
As Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters this week, the old structure did not fit the “top-down approach” of President Trump, who views the institution’s proper role as carrying out his decisions…Also gone: The board of experts who were trying to learn lessons from China’s astoundingly successful hack into the country’s telecommunications networks — where, by all accounts, they remain to this day. Then came historians at the State Department and the climate specialists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which employed experts in weather, oceans, climate and biodiversity.
“He has never been especially intrigued by governance,” she says. “He is about power. I think you’re seeing that now.”
One of the things that I think is clear is that there are aspects of what he’s doing now that are how he has hoped his presidency would be the first time. Because of the last couple of years and because of a Supreme Court ruling that gave him broad immunity, he is pretty untethered. So I think that explaining his views of power, which are pretty raw, is important.
Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency’s current allocation.
Research and development spending might strike you as an unnecessary expense for the government. Perhaps you see it as something universities or private companies should instead be paying for themselves. But as research Ishows, if the government were to abandon its long-standing practice of investing in R&D, it would significantly slow the pace of U.S. innovation and economic growth.
A federal law helps homeless students get an education. Trump's budget could weaken it
Under the proposal, schools would not be required to spend this money on resources for students experiencing homelessness. "I think the proposal is devastating. It is anti-child. It is anti-education," says Maura McInerney, legal director at the Education Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization in Pennsylvania.
"The reality is that states and school districts typically do not direct resources towards homeless students unless dedicated funding is set aside for that purpose," McInerney says.
President Donald Trump’s second term as president will surely go down in history, though of course, just six months into his four-year term, much of this story has yet to be written. But it is already clear that most Americans will not be able to read exactly what Trump has said, as they have with previous presidents, during his current term in the White House.
The White House has removed the official transcripts of Trump’s public remarks from its government website, NBC News reported in May 2025, replacing the written transcripts with select videos and audio of Trump’s public appearances.
Donald Trump’s isolationist movement to put “America First” springs from a deep contempt for multilateral institutions and alliances, and indeed for any rule or organization that prevents the United States from doing whatever it wants in the world. But what constrains the United States through transparent rules constrains our adversaries much more, by creating international coalitions against their predatory ambitions. Trump seeks not only to harangue our partners, but to unilaterally dismantle our most cost-effective instruments to maintain American global security and influence.
In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.” The Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes. Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.
A book my mother constantly recommended…
Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks
In this witty and bestselling look at the cultural consequences of the information age, David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class—those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture.
What I am listening to…
What I am watching…
What I read every day…
