Problem, Protest, Insult, Dog
There’s no overarching theme to this post, save for the fact that all occurred this Saturday.
The Protest.
Along with hudreds of thousands (millions?) of other Americans, I showed up yesterday at the Hands Off protest in Grand Rapids. It was good to see many people I knew and meet new friends.
Despite the strong turnout, I can’t help but feel the smallness of the effort in comparison to the challenge we face. But I know that we need all the things right now, and this was one thing.
The Problem:
We need people power. And yet…will old tactics be sufficient to meet this new challenge? Daily, hourly we’re caught up in a bewildering news cycle of lies upon lies.
In The Atlantic yesterday, Pete Wehner addressed how we might get through “America’s epistemic crisis—where there’s no agreed-upon reality, where there’s a breakdown of a society’s system for deciding what’s true.”
Wehner and I are often on the same wavelength, and in this piece, he kindly quoted one of my recent posts here at CONNECTIONS:
It starts by asking the right questions, such as the one recently posed by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University: “How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”
Wehner turns to several different experts to address the question on many of our minds: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”
Before we have a comprehensive plan of action, Wehner understands that we need to know what we’re up against:
That means turning to experts on the history of disinformation, such as Thomas Rid, who can talk about how societies have addressed these questions in the past; political psychologists, such as Australia’s Karen Stenner, who can help develop the language for how to reach people awash in distortions and deceptions; and experts in psychology and neuroscience, such as Jay Van Bavel, whose work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, intergroup bias, and social media. It includes turning to cognitive scientists such as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, who study how people reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs; philosophers of science such as Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, who argue that social forces explain the persistence of false beliefs; Peter Pomerantsev, who specializes in overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization; and political scientists such as Brendan Nyhan, who works on subjects including misperception and conspiracy theories.
Experts in the field of misinformation say that we know a lot about different kinds of misinformation, who is targeted and why, and the means to spread it. What we don’t know, at least not yet, is how to stop it. (Interventions in which people had placed hope a few years ago—including fact-checking, warning labels, and digital-literacy training—have a somewhat mixed record.)
“Things that can break down trust began rapidly scaling over the past decade or so, whereas the things that can rebuild trust just do not scale,” Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who works on disinformation, told The New York Times. Figuring out how to scale up trust and truth is a central challenge of our time. It will take individuals and groups working together to insist on seeing the world as it actually is. Think of it as a dissident movement, an American Solidarity movement.
Wehner is not without hope: “I HAVE A HUNCH, OR AT LEAST A HOPE. As Donald Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow….Trump is an agent of chaos, and chaos has a human cost.”
Which is to say, it will probably need to get worse—maybe much worse—before it gets better.
The Insult.
It was a text from Robby that first alerted me to The New York Times article on the lengthy list of books purged from the US Naval Academy’s academic library. His White Too Long was among them, as was Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism, Bryan Massingale’s Racial Justice adn the Catholic Church, and Jim Wallis’s The False White Gospel, and Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop.
But despite having the word “white” in the subtitle, Jesus and John Wayne somehow failed to make the cut. Humiliating.
It’s not really funny, though. Not at all.
Here’s what Robby wrote over on his Substack.
To understand just how chilling this book ban is, you have to understand the place that the Naval Academy holds in the American higher education landscape. As a selective four-year college, it is the highest-ranked among the three US military academies. According to US News & World Report, the Naval Academy is ranked #4 in the National Liberal Arts Colleges category, just behind Williams College, Amherst College, and Swarthmore College. It ranks higher, for example, than well-known prestigious liberal arts colleges such as Bowdoin, Pomona, Wellesley, and Carleton. Its alumni include the likes of President Jimmy Carter and Senator John McCain.
Here is its mission statement: “As the undergraduate college of our country’s naval service, the Naval Academy prepares young men and women to become professional officers of competence, character, and compassion in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.” As to what constitutes character, the first concept in the Naval Academy’s honor code reads:
Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.
They tell the truth and ensure that the truth is known.
They do not lie.
The book bans that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have implemented at the US Naval Academy are a direct assault on its own mission and a clear violation of its own honor code. Developing competence requires exposure to the best existing scholarship in the field; developing character requires living a life of principal and dedication to the truth; developing compassion requires being able to grasp the world from the perspective of another—something arts, literature, and a critical humanities-based education fosters. Most importantly, book bans prevent the Naval Academy from developing persons of integrity. Book bans are an aggressive, systemic form of lying, both about the past and the present.
Removing these books from the academic library—which almost certainly excludes them from course adoption—means that any student attending the once-prestigious Naval Academy will receive a distorted education. Worst of all, it requires Naval Academy professors to lie to their students rather than modeling courage and integrity.
This defilement of a respected academic institution by those who are waging an outright assault on higher education is, disturbingly, the goal. Honor and integrity are inconvenient stumbling blocks on the road to absolute power. To create a new American authoritarianism, Trump and Hegseth must invert our most cherished values, maligning truth-telling as divisive ideology and censoring critical scholarship in the name of freedom of speech.
Additional books the administration doesn’t want you reading include:
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Field, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism
Eddie Glaude, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul
Michael Kimmel, The Gendered Society
Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan
Ulrika Rublack, Gender in Early Modern German History
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I encourage you to read the entire list. It’s stunning.
Finally…
The Dog.
This has nothing to do with any of the other things.
Yesterday morning, we did something that makes absolutely no sense right now. We drove down to the local humane society and adopted this little stray.
He’s the sweetest little guy (see that tail-in-motion?), but the five of us cannot settle on a name.
Moji? Buddy? Pita? Biscuit? Luca?
If you’ve got ideas, please share them in the comments below. We need something more specific than “the dog.”
I find it refreshing to think of dog names, as a break from everything political. Imagine how much love your dog will provide you with! I kind of like Percy, short for Persist.
As a retired (paid) high school English teacher, I would like to share something all of your teacher-readers and home-schooler parents can do: Study ANIMAL FARM and 1984 by George Orwell. It's in the latter, especially, that the problem you speak of is strongly predicted and now has happened: the lack of any basis for fact. A lot of people are confused. They think that DJT and his minions tell lies and that is the problem. No. The problem is that, like Big Brother's history department, they change the story so often that no one has a basis for judging what is accurate, what is true. This defeats most protests against tyranny. (If you need an American play, try THE CRUCIBLE, and if you want to focus on history, try the McCarthy Era. When I taught these things students asked lots of questions: "Isn't that what's happening" in . . . our church, our provincial/state government, our news channels?