The Thriller
Well-Known Member
Interesting analysis:
“his useful graph from Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress, which shows how the Trump budget proposal dramatically cuts spending on domestic discretionary spending, a broad category that includes education, science research, environmental protection, child care, national parks, housing and regulation. It illustrates an almost halving of support from the historic benchmark, a huge walk-back from some of the key policies that support a modern society...
Trump’s budget echoes Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which used propaganda to justify an attack on higher education, fueling a lost decade for Chinese research and a much longer period of damage to state capacity and innovation. America is now pressing the self-destruct button on science just in time for China’s careful decades-long reinvestment to allow it to take the lead from us. Imagine a Sputnik moment, but where an American President leads a propaganda campaign to not compete with Russia.
There is a broader pattern here: the embrace of propaganda has become the default tone of an administration no longer hiding its authoritarian impulses. Government press releases sound like unhinged Truth Social posts, likely because many of those writing the press releases were social media posters. White House Cabinet meetings and press events increasingly sound like something out of North Korea.”
donmoynihan.substack.com
“his useful graph from Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress, which shows how the Trump budget proposal dramatically cuts spending on domestic discretionary spending, a broad category that includes education, science research, environmental protection, child care, national parks, housing and regulation. It illustrates an almost halving of support from the historic benchmark, a huge walk-back from some of the key policies that support a modern society...
Trump’s budget echoes Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which used propaganda to justify an attack on higher education, fueling a lost decade for Chinese research and a much longer period of damage to state capacity and innovation. America is now pressing the self-destruct button on science just in time for China’s careful decades-long reinvestment to allow it to take the lead from us. Imagine a Sputnik moment, but where an American President leads a propaganda campaign to not compete with Russia.
There is a broader pattern here: the embrace of propaganda has become the default tone of an administration no longer hiding its authoritarian impulses. Government press releases sound like unhinged Truth Social posts, likely because many of those writing the press releases were social media posters. White House Cabinet meetings and press events increasingly sound like something out of North Korea.”
Budgets as Propaganda
Trump's budget proposal formalizes the paranoid style as government policy
donmoynihan.substack.com
