An international study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, analyzed millions of tweets by members of Congress over the last decade. Its findings showed both Republican and Democratic politicians were increasingly sharing their beliefs and opinions as well as evidence-based information. But among Republicans, their expression of honestly-held beliefs and opinions was strongly linked to less trustworthy information sources.

Lead author Jana Lasser, a postdoctoral research fellow in computational social science at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), said, "We wanted to find out what reasons and social changes contribute to people sharing untrustworthy information."

Republicans: Clear correlation of belief-speaking and poorly rated sources

Using statistical models, the findings demonstrated a clear correlation between the language pattern of belief-speaking and the linking of poorly rated sources, such as low-quality news sites reporting poorly researched 'facts,' for Republican members of Congress.

"In spreading their opinions and beliefs on Twitter, the Republicans are moving more and more in the direction of right-wing populists," added Lasser. "A few years ago, the quality of the linked websites was comparable to those shared by CDU MPs in Germany. Meanwhile, the level has sunk to that of the AfD."

A now-played-out rom-com cliche is when one woman tells another, "Girlfriend, it's your boyfriend." The banjaxed campaign to make Ron DeSantis into the President of the United States has a similar problem.

Campaign, it's your candidate.

That is the obvious, insoluble problem with the whole enterprise. Ron DeSantis is a wooden, inflexible meathead who tromps on his own dick like he's trying to make dick wine out of it. He's tried to go around Trump to the right and he's fallen repeatedly on his face. It has dawned on the Republican donor class that they have bought a dead parrot. Vivek Ramaswamy is creeping up in the polls. And the former president* is leading all the contenders despite the fact that he's cracking up on social media between federal indictments. In the middle of this political morass, DeSantis is sinking like a stone. And what is strategic reboot from whoever it is that's left at the top of the campaign? You won't believe it. From Politico:

Among the changes being made were to “expose” voters to DeSantis more, said Nick Iarossi, a Florida-based lobbyist and fundraiser who was at the event. “Let Ron be Ron,” added Iarossi. “That’s what got him here. That’s what made him the leader that he is in Florida. We’re going back to our basics on all of this.”

Let Ron Be Ron.

You have to be kidding. For all his fatal flaws, Ron DeSantis has been as utterly without artifice. First of all, he can't carry it off. He's neither smart nor flexible enough. He has been what he's always been—a jumped-up lucky boy who did two terms in the House that he spent as one of the former president*'s troupe of performing poodles. He barely fell across the finish line to beat Andrew Gillum in his first gubernatorial run. Through it all, he has been the wooden, bizarrely anomic human facsimile that he's been on the campaign trail this year. You might as well let Ron be Ron because he doesn't have the talent to be anyone else.

His latest foray into the happy land of WTF? came this week when he said that he'd consider making Robert Kennedy, Jr. the head of FDA or the CDC. You could almost hear the wallets snap shut up and down the Hamptons—where, it seems, his campaign had to cut the minimum donation in half during the fundraising trip, Ron being Ron and all. Nobody else wants to be.

Yesterday a team of international researchers confirmed that human-caused climate change is driving the life-threatening heat waves in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. has broken more than 2,000 high temperature records in the past month, and it looks like July will be the hottest month on Earth since scientists have kept records.

Another study published yesterday warns that the Atlantic currents that transport warm water from the tropics north are in danger of collapsing as early as 2025 and as late as 2095, with a central estimate of 2050. As Arctic ice melts, the cold water that sinks and pulls the current northward is warming, slowing the mechanism that moves the currents. The collapse of that system would disrupt rain patterns in India, South America, and West Africa, endangering the food supplies for billions of people. It would also raise sea levels on the North American east coast and create storms and colder temperatures in Europe.

On Sunday and Monday, the ocean water off the tip of Florida reached temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius), the same temperature as an average hot tub. According to the Coral Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Florida’s Key Largo that works to protect coral reefs, the hot water has created “a severe and urgent crisis,” with mortality up to 100%. The Mediterranean Sea also hit a record high this week, reaching 83.1 degrees Fahrenheit (28.4 Celsius).

An op-ed by David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times today noted that more land burned in Quebec in June than in the previous 20 years combined; across Canada, more than 25 million acres burned. And most of Canada’s fire season is still ahead.

A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Columbia University says that court cases related to climate change have more than doubled in five years. Thirty-four of the 2,180 lawsuits have been brought forward on behalf of children, teens, and young adults.

And therein lies a huge problem for today’s Republican Party. A recent poll of young voters shows they care deeply about gun violence, economic inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change. All of those issues are only becoming more prominent.

And speaking of young people and the problems Republicans are having with that generation, I have only one other observation tonight, as I am spending this week reading the audiobook for the new book and am truly exhausted. It appears that the administration is pushing back on the attempts of states like Florida to whitewash our history by providing historical recaps in its press releases.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the desegregation of the armed forces by President Harry S. Truman in 1948, and the White House statement celebrating that anniversary did more than acknowledge it and praise today’s multicultural military. It recounted the history of Black service members from the American Revolution to the present.

It covered the Black regiments that fought in the Civil War to preserve the United States and defend their own freedom; the highly decorated Harlem Hellfighters of World War I who fought in France as part of the French army because American commanders would not have them alongside white units; the Tuskegee Airmen who flew 15,000 missions in World War II but returned home to discrimination and oppression.

Garry Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury, where he has been commenting on wounded warrior issues for more than three decades.

All around the conference room in Atlanta last fall, jaws were dropping. Michael Roy, a physician from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, had just revealed to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies the preliminary results of a study comparing two treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder: Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy, long regarded as the “gold standard,” and a novel approach called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories or RTM.

In such a study, effectiveness is indicated by a complete remission of symptoms, a loss of diagnosis. Roy’s trial was ongoing and still double-blinded, so he could report only the outcomes of the two treatments combined. But the success rate was a stunning 60 percent. Every expert present knew that PE’s known remission rate hovers at 30 to 40 percent, so the 60 percent combined figure could only mean only one thing: The new RTM treatment was tracking dramatically higher.

From the back of the room, PE researchers glowered at Roy: Way too good to be true, dude.

Except it wasn’t. Afterward, the praise from colleagues was effusive, with one top researcher telling RTM’s creator, Frank Bourke, that the presentation was a “home run.” At the same time, a PTSD researcher from the Department of Veterans Affairs approached one of Bourke’s teammates and said coldly, “I don’t think it’s useful to pick fights” — as though RTM’s success had been a provocation.

To fight for diversity on campus, we students have to talk about admissions.

Behind every movement lies discourse. Only by the free exchange of ideas can we diagnose issues as worthy of action, identify solutions, and convince others to join us.

That’s why the thing that unsettles me most about today’s decision is that admissions remains a dirty word on Harvard’s campus. There exists a politics of politeness that proscribes honest discussion about Harvard College’s admissions practices. This reluctance has long held back reform; now, it could restrain the student response to the fall of affirmative action too.

This hush does not result from a shortage of worthy topics. Harvard College gives significant admissions advantages to legacies, recruited athletes, the children of faculty, and the children of donors, a group that is collectively much whiter and wealthier than the rest of the student body. It holds open a backdoor for the kids of the rich and powerful in the form of the “Z-list.” And it slams the front door in the face of low-income students, with just 4.5 percent of undergraduates coming from the bottom quintile of the income distribution.

In short, admissions at Harvard is perhaps more nakedly unfair than anywhere else in the nation. But, in my experience at least, you’ll hardly hear a word about admissions outside of affirmative action.

Mostly, you’ll just find silence.

We don’t turn back our clocks for another four months. If American conservatives could have their way, they would turn back the last half-century. Back to when America was “great” in their eyes, in MAGA’s eyes. Back to when white dominance and The Lost Cause went unquestioned. Back to before the country agreed with the Civil Rights movement’s demands for equal voting rights and civil rights for minorities. Back to the world of the Cleavers and the Nelsons. Back to when women, too, knew their places.

Nostalgia not for lost innocence but for lost dominance is what made Donald Trump so attractive to the movement that grew up around him.

Speaking recently with Amanda Marcotte, David Neiwert (“The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy“) observed that fascism and neo-fascism have “actually been present in America since at least the early 1900s.” The increasing radicalization of the right has been there for years. Trump as their charismatic leader simply exploited it, gave it a mainstream platform, Neiwert says:

I don’t think they’re capable of winning, but I think a lot of people can get hurt and I think there will be a lot of people hurt by this, including them. One thing I’ve learned about right wing extremists over 30 years of covering them is that people who get involved in these movements destroy their lives. It’s one of the most toxic forces in America. It draws people into the abyss. It ruins their family relationships, ruins their relationships in the community. A lot of the time they wind up in prison.

All to preserve (or to restore) the power structures of the last century.

That is in part why MAGA Republicans display such affinity for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He too wishes to retain the traditional power dynamics that pertained during the last century (and prior to that). That death grip on what was destroys lives there, Fareed Zakaria writes:

I’ve been stunned by one statistic ever since I read it: A 15-year-old Russian boy today has the same life expectancy as a 15-year-old boy in Haiti. Remember, Russia is one of the world’s richest countries in terms of natural resources. And it is an urbanized, industrialized society with levels of education and literacy comparable to, and perhaps even exceeding, other European countries.

This analysis comes from an August 2022 working paper by scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, who has long studied demography. He points out that for three decades now, Russia has been depopulating. With a brief respite from 2013 to 2015, deaths have outpaced births, but he notes that this trend is one that we see in many industrialized countries.

What stands out in Russia is its mortality rate. In 2019 — before covid and the invasion of Ukraine — the World Health Organization estimated a 15-year-old boy in Russia could expect to live another 53.7 years, which was the same as in Haiti and below the life expectancy for boys his age in Yemen, Mali and South Sudan. Swiss boys around the same age could expect to live more than 13 years longer.

By multiple measures, the Russian people lag behind the rest of the 21st century.

Russia has a longstanding inferiority complex that mimics that of American Southerners. They still pick at the scabs of their defeat in the Civil War and resent seeing monuments to their romanticized insurrection finally come down. MAGA Republicans “organize discontent” over their lost social dominance that accompanied modernization and the computer age. Their resentments make Vladimir Putin a kindred spirit.

A reference Rick Perlstein makes in “Reaganland” to a Senate speech made during 1978 debates over ratification of the Panama Canal treaty caught my attention recently. Sen. Thomas J. McIntyre (D-N.H.) decries the “ominous change” in American politics represented by “the bully boys of the radical New Right” and their “politics of intimidation.”

Long before the Freedom Caucus, McIntyre called out Conservative Caucus “ideologues” who demand that “we must see every issue as they see it – unless there is something sinister in our motivation.” If you want to see more reactionary acrimony and personal destruction, McIntyre warned his colleagues, “stand aside and be silent.”

It is instructive reading. Nearly a half century ago, movement conservatism in its nascency planted the seeds of Trumpism and MAGA extremism.

THE CANAL TREATIES AND THE NEW RIGHT

(By Sen. Thomas J. McIntyre, D-N.H.) March 1, 1978 (as they appeared in the Washington Post of March 3 and Senate record of March 7)

I believe the techniques used to exploit the issue of the Panama canal treaties are the most compelling evidence to date that an ominous change is taking place in the very character and direction of American politics.

In his farewell broadcast several months ago, Eric Sevareid warned of the paradoxical rise of “dangerously passionate certainties” in a time of no easy answers.

One could speculate endlessly about the root cause of this development: a generation of disillusion and disenchantment with the lack of integrity and the misuse of power of leaders and institutions; the humbling experience in Vietnam; the unrelenting pressure of unfocused anxieties about national direction and purpose; and the all-too-human inclination to turn in frustration to the slogans and nostrums of a simpler time.

But whatever the cause, I see abundant evidence that these “dangerously passionate certainties” are being cynically fomented, manipulated and targeted in ways that threaten amity, unity and the purposeful course of government in order to advance a radical ideology that is alien to mainstream political thought.

Held v. State of Montana is a constitutional climate lawsuit brought by 16 Montana youth against their State to protect their equal rights to a healthy environment, life, dignity, and freedom. They are suing because their government keeps promoting and supporting fossil fuel extraction and burning, which is worsening the climate crisis and harming these youths’ lives.

The youth are suing to protect the air, waters, wildlife and their public lands that are threatened by drought, heat, fires, smoke, and floods.

The youth are also suing to have their equal rights as adults enforced under the Montana Constitution.

Anyone who still cares about the future has given up on the system. They get it. There’s no FDR coming to the rescue this time. Even if they still vote, they regard politics as a useless pantomime. It’s all driven by corporate interests, dark money, and fossil fuels. They aren’t buying vote blue anymore. They understand voting for what it is—keeping fascists out of power a little longer.

They’re working in the margins now. They’re working at the local level. They’re building communities. A lot of them aren’t trying to stop the worst of climate change anymore. They’re focused on survival. They don’t mean their own survival. They mean the survival of humanity, or even life itself.

Teenagers cry for help on TikTok.

They beg their leaders for action.

What do their leaders do?

They ban TikTok.

They try to raise the voting age while lowering the working age. You can serve them beer if you’re sixteen, but you have no say in the future. All things considered, it’s no wonder young people feel depressed and hopeless.

Nobody listens to them.

There’s a revolution underway, but it’s not a violent one. What’s the point? We’re long past the time that would’ve made a difference. Besides, I don’t know anyone who wants to get mauled by a robot or gassed by a drone.

Do you?

Unlike previous moments in history, the rich and powerful have prepared for massive social unrest. They’ve got private armies. They’ve got bombs. They’ve got robots and assault weapons. They’ve got a militarized police force with armored vehicles. A conventional uprising doesn’t stand a chance.

I think young people get it.

You can relax.

Some of us have discovered the secret.

Capitalism is going to fall apart on its own. It doesn’t need us to overthrow it. The collapse is already well underway. The billionaires can fight it all they want. They can spew out propaganda 24/7.

It won’t matter.

Meanwhile, young people are biding their time. They’re doing the bare minimum. They’re taking care of those around them. They’re building local ties. They’re saving what they can. They’re getting rest.

They’re waiting.

Anyone who still cares about the future has given up on the system. They get it. There’s no FDR coming to the rescue this time. Even if they still vote, they regard politics as a useless pantomime. It’s all driven by corporate interests, dark money, and fossil fuels. They aren’t buying vote blue anymore. They understand voting for what it is—keeping fascists out of power a little longer.

They’re working in the margins now. They’re working at the local level. They’re building communities. A lot of them aren’t trying to stop the worst of climate change anymore. They’re focused on survival. They don’t mean their own survival. They mean the survival of humanity, or even life itself.

Teenagers cry for help on TikTok.

They beg their leaders for action.

What do their leaders do?

They ban TikTok.

They try to raise the voting age while lowering the working age. You can serve them beer if you’re sixteen, but you have no say in the future. All things considered, it’s no wonder young people feel depressed and hopeless.

Nobody listens to them.

There’s a revolution underway, but it’s not a violent one. What’s the point? We’re long past the time that would’ve made a difference. Besides, I don’t know anyone who wants to get mauled by a robot or gassed by a drone.

Do you?

Unlike previous moments in history, the rich and powerful have prepared for massive social unrest. They’ve got private armies. They’ve got bombs. They’ve got robots and assault weapons. They’ve got a militarized police force with armored vehicles. A conventional uprising doesn’t stand a chance.

I think young people get it.

You can relax.

Some of us have discovered the secret.

Capitalism is going to fall apart on its own. It doesn’t need us to overthrow it. The collapse is already well underway. The billionaires can fight it all they want. They can spew out propaganda 24/7.

It won’t matter.

Meanwhile, young people are biding their time. They’re doing the bare minimum. They’re taking care of those around them. They’re building local ties. They’re saving what they can. They’re getting rest.

They’re waiting.