"The logic is straightforward, and it is evident not only in the Trump administration's approach to health but also to essential economic, environmental, immigration, and crime statistics: If you destroy the systems that measure harm and appoint corrupt functionaries to invent your desired figures, you destroy the evidence of your responsibility. If you make truth unknowable, accountability becomes impossible. Trump built his career on fraud: cooking the books, inflating assets, falsifying ledgers."
"But still, many are responding to Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s myriad misleading health claims by emphasizing the importance of debate. This plays straight into Trump's hands, because Trump and his cronies aren't, despite surface appearances, actually trying to claim authority over truth; they're trying to make belief in truth itself untenable. In this context, debate is a ruse. It's absurdist"
1,257 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists were informed their jobs no longer existed, including disease detectives on an active Ebola response, senior epidemiologists, and the entire Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report staff. The stated reason was bureaucratic, while the practical effect removed institutional capacity to document, count, and judge public-health harms. Similar erosion of essential economic, environmental, immigration, and crime statistics is evident through broken measurement systems and the placement of corrupt functionaries to invent figures. Making truth unknowable prevents accountability. Emphasizing debate can normalize the erasure of reliable public data.
Read at The Nation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]