Ask harder political questions to go on 'narrative offense'

Trump, says Anand Giridharadas yesterday on the Ink, takes advantage of other people's civil discourse "by ascribing the [airplane] crash to...DEI." Are we "being governed by a manosphere podcast"? Maybe.

"We don't know what caused the [airplane] crash. But the crash should be cause for reflection about the project of disemboweling the state.

The crash should cause us to remember that government matters. That staffing at agencies matters. That public goods matter. That competent leadership at the Pentagon matters, instead of hegsethian vapidity. That it’s dangerous to email millions of government workers, trying to trick them into quitting their jobs.

In short, there is much one can say in a moment like that while still being factual, still being classy, still being decorous. But refusing to be in the void-excavation business."

Stop digging the hole. Stop expanding the void.

Hey, a couple rules from Giridharadas:

"The first rule is not to leave the void. Don’t wait for meaning to make itself. It won’t.

The second rule: find ways of reacting that don’t end up being unconscious hyping.

When Trump attributes plane crashes to DEI, you don’t have to consent to having a conversation about DEI and plane crashes. You don’t have to do the newspaper thing of calling the statement controversial or reporting it and citing a 'lack of evidence.'"

Karen Attiah says we should reply to him by saying: "Are you saying that this crash was caused by desegregating the races?"

I actually wish the media would stop using "DEI" and "diversity hiring" and just get to the essence of the thing and ask: "Are you saying that this crash was caused by desegregating the races?" And see what happens.

[image or embed]

— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) January 30, 2025 at 12:25 PM

Jessica Marie Johnson (no longer on Bluesky) said: "Resegregation orders. Not anti-DEIA orders. Not a "rollback" of DEIA. A rollback of DEIA is a return to segregation. You don't break even on a desegregation order issued in 1965 or after. Resegregation. Segregation. Segregationist. Resegregation. Segregationist." (January 31, 2025)

"The remedy," Giridharadas says, "is not to avoid reacting to Trump. He is, like, the president. The remedy, rather, is to live in more than mere reaction to him. It is to go on narrative offense."

Insofar as "they are having fun. They are having a good time," (Christina Sharpe, Dec 5, 2025), maybe going on narrative offense means to make it less fun for them. It is tricky for me to come up with such a strategy, since it requires me to think like them. I don't actually know what deep degree of awfulness is the ingredient that enables them to have fun doing what they're doing. I don't know how suffering becomes glee, how shame becomes pride. I don't know why they don't have a second-order desire to change.

"Any Democrat who says “Voters don’t really care about this stuff” needs a good smack in the head. The answer to that problem is to make them care. Republicans do this all the time; if they have something they wish was on the agenda, they force it on the agenda, no matter how ridiculous it is or how removed it is from people’s lives. How many Americans cared five years ago about whether some middle school trans kid a hundred miles from where they live wanted to play softball? But they care about it now, because Republicans made them care."
— Paul Waldman, Democrats Need to Treat the Supreme Court Like the Villain It Is: The Court is out of control, and we'll never see reform unless we build the case for it. Starting now. Dec 5, 2025

Speaking of bearing false witness

Louisiana has mandated posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

"Louisiana classrooms now required by law to display the Ten Commandments," Stephanie Gallman Dianne Gallagher, CNN, June 19, 2024

Here's the law (PDF).

Donald Trump's reaction:

"'Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’? I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible,' Trump said at the gathering of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. 'They don’t want it to go up. It’s a crazy world.'

Trump a day earlier posted an endorsement of the new law on his social media network, saying: 'I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???'"

— "Trump Endorses Ten Commandments In Schools, Urges Evangelical Christians To Vote: Donald Trump has told a group of evangelicals that they 'cannot afford to sit on the sidelines' of the 2024 election, imploring them at one point to 'go and vote, Christians, please!'." Michelle L. Price and Ayanna Alexander, HuffPost, Jun 22, 2024

The reason that people who are secular or pluralistic don't think the Ten Commandments should be put up in public schools and other public buildings isn't that we think it should be legal to steal.

Speaking of bearing false witness.

Read more on Medium: Rep. Jamie Raskin’s book Unthinkable

"An initial review by The Texas Tribune of the proposed textbooks showed that religious references are featured prominently, with texts sourced from the Bible being the most heavily used." Texas is a really large textbook market which then sets the standard for those markets nationwide.

[image or embed]

— Nails Nathan (@chadstanton.bsky.social) Jun 27, 2024 at 6:38 PM

if you squint, you can see some of the last dying vestiges of principled bipartisan conservatism that used to be fairly common in oklahoma governance

[image or embed]

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) Jun 25, 2024 at 11:01 AM

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued this memo today requiring teachers in all schools to keep a Bible in their classroom and teach from it as a historical document. (Via KOCO 5 News)

[image or embed]

— David S. Bernstein (@dbernstein.bsky.social) Jun 27, 2024 at 12:54 PM

You can't vote a fact out of office

What's at stake in the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce?

(Update: The ruling was made June 28, and it "upended what’s called the 'Chevron doctrine,' a long-standing legal principle that gave federal agencies broad discretion to interpret the instructions Congress hands them for writing rules and regulations." &mdash, Jonathan Cohn, HuffPost) Media Matters published this headline: "Project 2025 partners join right-wing media and climate deniers to celebrate SCOTUS decision overturning Chevron deference."

Carrie Campbell Severino says in the conservative National Review yesterday that "agency expertise" is unnecessarily "cherished." So-called experts who work in government agencies are unelected and are little more than "bureaucrats," as she'd have it.

But consider: Experts know things. They are experts in something. They can find facts, analyze them and turn them into information, and communicate them to us.

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a June 11 article calls this "a rejection of democratic accountability in favor of the administrative state."

Source:

Yes, that's the point. Facts are not democratically accountable. You can't vote a fact out of office, and you shouldn't try. "Unelected" is not a synonym for "bad."

If the government does not have anyone with expertise in what the facts are, the government is full of people who are popular and who do not necessarily know anything, and thus cannot be held to account.

Republicans object to employing any government knowledge-workers who aren't on their team and can't be pressured at the ballot box to conform to their team. What they're pulling here is a power play.

Similarly

Some of Trump's supporters

"assert that there is too much separation of powers—that the Constitution doesn’t authorize the cabinet departments and the federal bureaucracy to defy the president as a sort of “fourth branch of government.” He’s elected and they’re not. The story is more complex than that: in many cases Congress deliberately set up semi-independent agencies, and the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled them unconstitutional. (The Court upheld the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of Republicans’ least favorite agencies, just a few weeks ago.) Some of these entities are pretty important: the Federal Reserve comes to mind. But it’s true that many presidents grow frustrated by the power of the bureaucracy."
Separation anxiety: A week of news illuminates, and tests, the separation of powers. Steve Inskeep, June 15, 2024

See here

Importing this @volts.wtf thread from the bad place. It opens with a link to a piece that used official data to establish that yes, crime rates are indeed very much down recently. But here’s the thing, Project 2025’s Trump 2.0 promises to destroy that world in which we can “know” things like this.

[image or embed]

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) Jun 27, 2024 at 7:57 AM

See:

"But the 'key part' and 'most important' for Americans 'to understand [about Project 2025] is this reshaping of the federal government,' she [Griffin] said.

'I saw the actual executive order at the end of the last administration, ready to go, that would remake every civil servant into a political appointee and a loyalist to Trump,' recalled Griffin, an apparent reference to Trump’s Schedule F plan, which he has vowed to reinstitute if he wins back the White House.

— Ex-Donald Trump Aide Names ‘Most Important’ Part Of Project 2025: It’s the “key part” that’s ready to go, warned Alyssa Farah Griffin. Lee Moran, HuffPost, Jul 12, 2024

Also

I keep on thinking about how John Roberts messed up nitrogen oxide with nitrous oxide in a ruling on how the courts were better suited to provide expertise than experts.

— Molly Shah (@mommunism.bsky.social) Jun 30, 2024 at 4:36 AM

Sometimes certain people feel it's unfair to debate certain other people who are going to win the debate

I had to double-check that this was the real New York Times headline for the story about his appearance on Hannity. It is.

[image or embed]

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) Sep 4, 2024 at 9:49 PM

More knowledge

I've written:

Expertise is knowing how to survive

We secrete the shell

What do we value when we value ignorance and hypocrisy?

Ben Smith's article in the New York Times (November 28, 2021) observes that it's easier to handle "an information crisis...than a political one." Some "well-meaning communications experts" have tended to believe, Smith writes, that "if only responsible journalists and technologists could explain how misguided Mr. Trump’s statements were, surely the citizenry would come around." Unfortunately, they "never quite understood that the people who liked him knew what was going on, laughed about it and voted for him despite, or perhaps even because of, the times he went 'too far.'" And that is still how they feel. It's not a lack of information. Some people deliberately choose falsehood. That is their politics.

They chose him a second time in the November 2024 election.

On October 12, 2025, Trump told journalists on Air Force One: "...literally, you walk over from Iran to Qatar. You can walk it in one second. You go ‘boom boom,’ and now you’re in Qatar..."

Post on X

On that note... Spotted on Twitter, an argument:

"Hemry, Local Bartender" says: People who take health precautions during pandemic — vaccines, masks — tend to assume that people who deliberately avoid these precautions are missing some information. But maybe they just understand any sort of public health measure as totalitarian. For them, there are no shades of lockdown. Their values might be "completely withdrawn from the social compact." When others incorrectly assume that they have certain values, it further "violently alienates them." And there may be nothing you can do to change their minds. You can't give them values like empathy and solidarity. As long as they lack relevant values, you can't give them information (usefully organized facts for particular purposes). They will do nothing with the information.

I've been confused by the rightwing rhetoric about "NO MORE LOCKDOWNS" and misinterpreting it as cynical demagoguery, since we never had a real "lockdown" and the most stringent pandemic measures ended over a year ago. But they're just coding every health measure as "lockdown"

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

It seems obvious now in retrospect but it really is just purely binary to these people; taking the barest minimum precautions (e.g. an "indoor mask mandate" where guests can remove their masks to eat and drink") is tantamount to unfettered totalitarianism in their minds

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

The upshot is I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding when we say people are "living in two different realities" or victims of misinformation because therein is an assumption that if they had better information they would make a better choice. I don't think that's true

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

I think, and again this seems obvious now, that these are people who have constructed a value system that is almost completely withdrawn from the social compact as we generally understand. I.e. better information doesn't alter their ethical framework.

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

That is to say, the assumption that people are making decisions based on different value systems that still have important common features is sometimes just disastrously wrong. Sometimes there's a key piece missing and the assumption that it's there just violently alienates them.

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

Anyway it seemed quite bleak to me in the moment and does still more to me now after further thought because I don't think there is anything you can do to help these people that isn't going to further anger them. They just can't be allowed to hold power.

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

Several days ago, I had a brief online exchange with a blogger (not Hemry; someone else). This blogger made a strange, incoherent argument. I've squinted at it trying to put it into some logical order. Roughly, this was his position. This is as coherent as I can possibly make it.

He says: (1) Our ethical choices are “authentic” only if we have total individual freedom. When we instead constrain ourselves to manage collective risk, we’re focusing on an abstraction. It’s a hyperobject whose justification we don’t fully understand. Since we don’t understand it, we’re not making a truly ethical choice. We’re only ethical when we make choices whose extended ramifications we fully understand.

He also says: (2) There is a coronavirus, but people don’t die of it. They die, instead, of unspecified “political and economic” causes that are being blamed on the virus. Therefore, transmitting the virus is “solidarity.” (I guess his reasoning is that, if enough of us get the virus — as if over 260 million confirmed cases and over 5 million deaths worldwide is not yet enough evidence — we will eventually realize the true political and economic causes of other people's deaths? Seems to be a kind of scientific experiment to isolate variables?)

(1) and (2) are apparently contradictory, though. (1) says not to act on things you don't understand. (2) says let's run a biology experiment on each other and deliberately give each other disease to find out why 5 million people are said to have already died of that disease so that we can better understand it. That’s this guy's value system. That's "ethical engagement" (1) and "solidarity" (2) to him. In a sense, the contradiction — the hypocrisy — is what he values.

I think that is similar to what Hemry the Bartender points out.

Then, this: Not everyone on the right believes in total individual freedom all the time, of course. There are right-wing arguments for imposing restrictions on many people's bodies. Notably, they generally want to restrict a woman's right to choose abortion. Upon reading Michelle Goldberg's article in the New York Times yesterday, a related question posed itself to me this way: Is it that some people sincerely believe that totalitarian coercion ought to apply to some people and not others (e.g., to women of childbearing age and not men), or are they deliberately hypocritical because hypocrisy proves a successful political strategy for them? In other words, do they sincerely hold any ideals, or do they just seek power?

"It's standard bully behavior for a bully to always cast themselves as the victim of their own behavior. It's standard behavior of an abuser to reverse the victim and offender, to claim the people they dehumanize are dehumanizing them by resisting them, to claim that what they are doing to others is being done to them. Doing so demonstrates the supremacist belief that only supremacists matter. Hypocrisy is a virtue to a supremacist.

We should know this very well by now, but all the same we seem persistently immune, culturally speaking, to this knowledge."

— A.R. Moxon, Apology Not Accepted, The Reframe, Nov 3, 2024

Quotes: Learning from people who are different

Without stealing or unfairly/inexpertly appropriating ideas from each other, we can learn from each other. Two reflections on this:

“The Jew can teach the Indian a lot about how to survive as a people and as a culture while being uprooted from one’s homeland, and against the odds of genocide and forceful proselytizing campaigns perpetrated by dominant religions and cultures. The Indian can teach the Jew a lot about what the Jew has lost at the expense of centuries of survival consciousness and uprootedness from connection to the land, information that is far more fresh in the ways of the Indians than it is in the ways of contemporary Jews.”
Gershon Winkler. Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2003. p. xx.

"Sufi mystics were renowned for their poetic testimonies to a paradigm of self-annihilation (fana) followed by a return to the glorious ‘subsistence’ (baqa) of everyday life. And similar notions, I believe, are to be found in Hindu teachings of the mystical heart-cave (quha) and Buddhist teachings on sacred emptiness (sunyata) and nothingness (nirvana)."
Richard Kearney. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

On how we can internalize the perspective of a parent (or anyone close to us), as we imagine they would express their perspective:

"What’s always funny, with me and Mom, is how the conversation can continue even when we’re not in the same room—how whenever I feel especially under pressure, I almost always start to hear my own internal version of her arguing with what I think might be her internal version of me, as though I’m rehearsing our next argument in my head, playing through things I’d never have the guts to say to her in person. Except . . . maybe it’s less “guts” than simple forbearance, a wistful wish to seem more reasonable than I often think I’m capable of being, plus the insight to know exactly how crazy most of the shit I long to spew at her would sound, if blurted out loud: how bitter, how scary. How essentially unnatural."
Gemma Files. Experimental Film. Toronto, Canada: ChiZine, 2015. P. 191.

A shared reality affects how we interpret our personal experiences:

"...two recognitions of human life that sound paradoxical but are actually complementary. First, people’s experiences are intensely personal; claims to the uniqueness of experience are true and deserve to be honored. Second, people’s ability to have experiences depends on shared cultural resources that provide words, meanings, and the boundaries that segment the flow of time into episodes. Experiences are very much our own, but we don’t make up these experiences by ourselves.”
Arthur W. Frank. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. (Originally published 1995.) Second edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Preface, 2013.

Religion may make you happy, but that does not make it true

Religion makes some people happy, but their feelings do not mean that their religion is true.

Richard Dawkins:

I wish it were not necessary to add that such beneficial effects in no way boost the truth value of religion’s claims. In George Bernard Shaw’s words, ‘The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.’

A common strategy is for the religion to make the followers feel worthless or broken and then to give them back their sense of worth and wholeness.

Alan Watts:

...if one wants to feel exhilaratingly light-footed, it is always possible to go around for some time with lead in one's shoes — and then take them off. The sense of relief will certainly be proportional to the length of time such shoes have been worn, and to the weight of the lead. This is equivalent to the old trick of religious revivalists who give their followers a tremendous emotional uplift by first implanting an acute sense of sin, and then relieving it through faith in Jesus. But such 'uplifts' do not last...

When we are dissatisfied with life, what we need is not necessarily a religion to fix us, but simply to change our attitude and be grateful for what we do have.

Fenton Johnson:

Dissatisfaction...is the first principle of Buddhism, and thus the foundation on which the whole philosophy is built; if it weren't universally applicable, it would be a pretty weak basis. As a reasonably prosperous, reasonable healthy American I can't really be said to be 'suffering,' at least not in the context of much of the world's population; but we all suffer from dissatisfaction, always and everywhere. And what is the antidote to dissatisfaction? Gratitude.

Perhaps the question we need to ask is not whether God can put up with us until we come to him, fix us in a particular way, and approve of our perfected nature, but whether we can accept ourselves as we are, as works in progress.

Gary Bowen:

I doubt that anyone can achieve religious faith until they start tolerating human frailties.

Sources

Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. p. 167.
Alan Watts. The Way of Zen. Originally 1957. Vintage Spiritual Classics Edition 1999. p 170.
Fenton Johnson in “Keeping Faith,” interviewed by Bo Young. White Crane Journal, Fall 2004, Issue #62, p 7.
Gary Bowen, in Raven Kaldera. Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook. XLibris Press, 2001. p 189.

Quotes: Is the world an illusion, and what do we know about it?

Upton Sinclair:

In college, when they were teaching me the theories of the world's leading philosophers, I said to the stout and jolly professor: "Why doesn't someone make a philosophy based on common sense?" Said he: "What do you mean by common sense?" I replied: "The things we all really know are true." That was more than forty years ago; the philosophers called "pragmatists" were already at work, but nobody appeared to know about them in the College of the City of New York, nor later in Columbia University.

Rene Descartes:

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the whole world. Everyone thinks that they are well endowed with it, so that even those who are most difficult to please in every other respect do not usually wish to have more than they already possess.

Clive James:

I am showing them [young people] the way to a necessary failure: the grim but edifying realization that a complete picture of reality is not to be had.

Fernando Pessoa:

There is only one problem: reality, and that is insoluble and alive. What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know I have the dream. What does that really mean?

Upton Sinclair, again:

When Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked a stone, and said he knew it was there, the old fellow wasn't telling us anything except that he was a dogmatist... * * * The difference between myself and the materialist is that I don't know and say so, while he doesn't know but says he does. * * * Let us be ever so proud of our intellect, a portion of our subconscious remains the primitive thing that evolution has made it; and upon that mind we have to depend for the assimilating of our food, the making of new blood, the repair of tissues--yes, even of the mighty cortex, which has explored all the secrets of the universe, but does not know how to build a single cell of its own tissue.

Ralph Minogue:

Humans have always suffered the illusion of knowledge while living the reality of belief.

Sources

Upton Sinclair, What God Means to Me. New York: Ferris Printing Company, 1935. 24.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I

Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. xxv.

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 126.

Upton Sinclair, What God Means to Me. New York: Ferris Printing Company, 1935. 15-6, 24, 39.

Ralph Minogue. Responsibility To, Responsibility For. Baltimore: AmErica House, 2000. p 21.

Twitter allows bots to spread false information about COVID-19

Here's an example of a Twitter bot sharing false information.

What people?
Name them.
What better way to lead people to slaughter than to tell them the "experts" say we need this.
HOW MANY DIED UNDER OBAMA? (H1N1) pic.twitter.com/t9AyfXm8DA

— 154,552 Sealed Indictments ⭐⭐⭐ (@Theresa78375601) March 23, 2020

What looks wrong about this? First of all, I personally remember the H1N1 flu. People were initially concerned about it, but it turned out to be a regular flu. At least one of my close family members eventually was diagnosed with it, had only mild symptoms, and was told not to worry. I don't even remember if I had it. The idea that H1N1 killed one of out every five sufferers is simply not plausible to me; it does not track with my own memory.

How do I check the data in this image? Conveniently for me, the fakers left the news outlet's logo, "Business Insider," in the image of the chart. Perhaps this was intentional, to make the chart appear more official. However, it also allows me to easily research whether this is indeed a Business Insider chart. I simply Google the name of the publication together with the title or keywords from the alleged material ["Business Insider" "Wuhan coronavirus compared to other major viruses"].

Here's the real information. The Business Insider chart (from an article dated 30 January 2020, viewed 23 March 2020) is different from what the bot shared on Twitter. It's clearly modified to make the 2009 H1N1 virus look more dangerous than it was.

Another difference between the charts is that the fake one has "Wuhan coronavirus" data updated as of 30 January, while the real one has "COVID-19" data checked again as of 4 February. Business Insider's original chart indeed likely used the name "Wuhan coronavirus" (it's still used in their article). The name "COVID-19" was probably swapped out later, as that name was announced on 11 February, so Business Insider probably updated their chart later to reflect the new name (and didn't provide a new "as of" date, because the data is still only current as of 4 February).

The difference in the name of the coronavirus is therefore not concerning; Business Insider is entitled to update their own images at any time to reflect better terminology. What is concerning is the difference in the H1N1 data from 2009, which could not have changed. The H1N1 virus ultimately had a fatality rate of 0.02%. The false chart is claiming that H1N1 was around 870 times more lethal than it was.

You'll notice I edited the JPGs directly to indicate which is false and which is real. I want you to know the reason why I put that information in the JPG and not merely as text captions within this blog post! It's because I don't want the false JPG to spread any further.

And who is responsible for the spread of false information on social media? The people who create these bots, and the Twitter executives who allow the bots to exist.

Sharpiegate

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has not had a confirmed leader since Trump took office in January 2017. Trump nominated Barry Myers, whose conflict of interest is so blatant that the government has preferred to confirm no one at all for the job.

On May 1, 2019, a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times discussed the nomination of Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather and the brother of the current CEO, for head of NOAA. The conflict of interest is that "AccuWeather allegedly has tried to restrict [NOAA's public activities], largely because services provided by the National Weather Service, a NOAA agency, compete with AccuWeather’s business model of offering similar services for a price." In 2005, the Myers family asked Sen. Rick Santorum "to introduce legislation that would have barred the National Weather Service from issuing any weather forecasts that could be issued by private businesses. The Weather Service would be limited to forecasting extreme events such as hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis."

Myers is not even a scientist, as all but one previous heads of NOAA have been. Rather:

'Myers has built his business by taking NOAA data paid for by the taxpayers and turning it into products that AccuWeather sells,' observes Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA scientist and manager who is now director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'There’s nothing wrong with that, but he’s also pushed for the idea that the government shouldn’t compete with private business.'

While Myers had already resigned his position as CEO and divested his stock shares, nevertheless AccuWeather remains his family business, and "the overhanging suspicion of a revolving-door appointment can’t help but undermine the public’s faith that an appointee is acting exclusively in the public interest," the LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik explained.

On September 1, 2019, as Hurricane Dorian made its devastating Category 5 landfall in the Bahamas, President Trump claimed that Alabama “would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated." There was no evidence for this. Hours later, NOAA sent a memo to the National Weather Service, saying that staff should not "provide any opinion" and "only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise from some national level social media posts which hit the news this afternoon." In other words: Don't contradict the president.

A NOAA meteorologist who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said the note, understood internally to be referring to Trump, came after the National Weather Service office in Birmingham contradicted Trump by tweeting Alabama would 'NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.'

The same meteorologist said: “This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast."

David Titley, NOAA's COO during the Obama administration, tweeted that he didn't "know how they [NOAA leadership] will ever look their workforce in the eye again. Moral cowardice." Jane Lubchenco, who was a NOAA administrator during the Obama administration, said: "This looks like classic politically motivated obfuscation to justify inaccurate statements made by the boss." Michael Halpern, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, asked, "If we’re politicizing the weather what is there left to politicize?"

After Trump tried on Sept. 1 to prove that he was correct by showing a hurricane map that had been crudely modified with a Sharpie to include Alabama in the hurricane's path, NOAA again "sent a similar message warning scientists and meteorologists not to speak out."

For six days — during which the weather in Alabama was "bone dry" according to the chief meteorologist at a CBS-affiliated news source in Huntsville — "Mr. Trump continued his relentless campaign to prove that he was right when he predicted that Hurricane Dorian could hit Alabama regardless of what the scientists said."

On Sept. 5, NOAA's deputy undersecretary for operations sent an internal email saying that Trump's doctored map was "crazy." (The email was released four months later as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.)

On Sept. 6, NOAA's Birmingham, Alabama office took a stand contrary to Trump's position, issuing a tweet stating that Alabama would not be affected. In response to the NOAA dissent, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross reportedly threatened to fire NOAA leadership. (The pressure reportedly came from Trump, through White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, to the Commerce Secretary. Ross denies having made those threats, and the Commerce Department opened an internal investigation into the matter.) NOAA then issued an unsigned statement that disavowed the tweet by the Birmingham office.

NOAA is no longer standing by this tweet from the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service after it appeared to correct Trump's comments that Dorian was posing a threat to Alabama. (Fact check: On day Trump talked about AL being hit, the storm was turning away from AL) https://t.co/yUNrUjpqvU pic.twitter.com/MrtEs3brge

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) September 6, 2019

Update: In January 2025, Jim Acosta is leaving CNN. CNN, to placate Trump, offered to move him to a less prominent timeslot, which he turned down and said he'd rather quit.

On Sept. 7, NOAA's acting chief scientist Craig McLean emailed NOAA leadership: "For an agency founded upon and recognized for determining scientific truths, trusted by the public, and responsible in law to put forward important science information, I find it unconscionable that an anonymous voice inside of NOAA would be found to castigate a dutiful, correct, and loyal (National Weather Service) Forecaster who spoke the truth." (This email was also released four months later as part of the FOIA request.)

On Sept. 9, New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman wrote:

At first Sharpiegate, Donald Trump’s inability to admit that he misstated a weather projection by claiming that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, was kind of funny, even though it was also scary — it’s not reassuring when the president of the United States can’t face reality. But it stopped being any kind of joke on Friday, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement falsely backing up Trump’s claim that it had warned about an Alabama threat.

Why is this frightening? Because it shows that even the leadership of NOAA, which should be the most technical and apolitical of agencies, is now so subservient to Trump that it’s willing not just to overrule its own experts but to lie, simply to avoid a bit of presidential embarrassment.

Think about it: If even weather forecasters are expected to be apologists for Dear Leader, the corruption of our institutions is truly complete.

By January 2020, the White House was tweeting fake snowflakes in Washington DC, prompting journalists to waste time debunking yet another fake weather report.

I usually ignore stuff like this, but it’s literally the first time in more than 20 years that Washington has had back-to-back 70-degree days in January. What is even the point of this lie? https://t.co/cy5ZSobDGt https://t.co/JSUEcplKId

— Kimberly Atkins (@KimberlyEAtkins) January 13, 2020

I don’t want to sound like Alex Jones here but is this some sort of secret communication? Racking my brain to make any sort of sense of this. It nearly hit 70 degrees in DC today. https://t.co/aLwOz5HKVD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 13, 2020

Hurricane Helene

On September 30, 2024, Trump said of Hurricane Helene, which had just killed over 200 people: “It’s so extensive, nobody thought this would be happening, especially now it’s so late in the season for the hurricanes.”

HuffPost corrected the record: "It is currently slap-bang in the middle of hurricane season." The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) itself says: "The Atlantic hurricane season is June 1st to November 30th." Trump and his allies have big plans to dismantle NOAA.

"Asheville was supposed to be one of those places where people were safer from climate disasters." Climate advocate and Asheville resident, Melissa Hanson, describes the horror of Helene -- a very unnatural disaster www.scientificamerican.com/article/hurr...

[image or embed]

— Aimee Witteman (@aimeewitteman.bsky.social) October 4, 2024 at 1:02 PM

Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘They Can Control The Weather,’ Promoting Conspiracy About Hurricane Helene: Right-wingers have long promoted wild theories about weather control, and Greene, a Donald Trump ally, gave them a big boost. Christopher Mathias, HuffPost, Oct 4, 2024

The entirety of Greene's tweet was: "Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done." She didn't say who "they" are, which was surely intentional vagueness on her part. If someone really could control the weather, it would be important to say whom. Greene is happy to blur assumptions of "the Jews" and "the Democrats" and anyone else the right-wing is currently maligning.

The 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season officially ends on November 30, but the outlook is very quiet out there, so it very likely ended on October 31 this year. Overall, it was a slightly above-average season with some strange characteristics.

[image or embed]

— Brian McNoldy (@bmcnoldy.bsky.social) November 14, 2025 at 11:58 AM

"As deadly tornadoes tore through the Midwest and Plains last weekend, state and local search-and-rescue crews rushed to the devastated areas to look for survivors. It wasn’t until the teams deployed that they realized they were operating without a critical tornado-tracking tool typically provided by FEMA.

That left responders with a less precise picture of where to search first, two sources familiar with the situation told CNN."

Exclusive: Search-and-rescue units respond without tornado-tracking tool after Noem’s team let contract lapse, Gabe Cohen, CNN, March 13, 2026

At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared in recent years, sparking federal investigation, Natasha Chen, Alex Stambaugh, Chris Boyette, CNN, April 21, 2026

shitty weather forecasts? blame elon and his merry band of dipshits because they gutted NOAA on the basis of “lol who needs to measure climate anyway” everything bad these days seem to be his fault, trump’s fault, or both

[image or embed]

— Micah (@rincewind.run) June 30, 2026 at 9:36 PM

jfc it's true, if reality doesn't fit their bet - they bend the reality www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/e...

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) July 18, 2026 at 8:37 PM

Three weeks, no shower, and 'Kafka By Way of Orwell'

The Dallas News tells the following story.

An 18-year-old U.S. citizen was recently detained by U.S. Border Patrol. He was born in Dallas and lives in Texas. He has dual citizenship with Mexico, and he has a U.S. visitors visa that he used dozens of times to travel back and forth. When Border Patrol stopped him, the man was "carrying a Texas ID, wallet-sized birth certificate and Social Security card." The government wrote up a "Notice to Appear" dated June 29, 2019 that says:

The Department of Homeland Security alleges that you:
1. You are not a citizen or national of the United States;
2. You are a native of MEXICO and a citizen of MEXICO;
* * *
6. [After being stopped at the Falfurrias, Texas Border Control Checkpoint on or about June 27, 2019] you falsely represented yourself to be a citizen of the United States..."

He is a U.S. citizen. Nonetheless, Border Patrol detained him and his younger brother. After two days, his younger brother chose to be deported "so that he could tell his mother what was happening with his situation and that of his brother." The 18-year-old man was held for 23 days, during which time he was not allowed to shower and lost 26 pounds.

The Dallas Morning News reported his story on July 22, and the man was released from custody the next day.

On July 25, Brian Hastings, Chief of Law Enforcement at the U.S. Border Patrol, testified about the matter before the House Judiciary Committee. Hastings claimed that the man was detained because he had "claimed to be a Mexican National who was born in Reynosa, Mexico....with no immigration documents to be in or remain in the U.S....At no time in Border Patrol custody did he say that he was a U.S. citizen.”

In response to this, the man's attorney produced the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security's "Notice to Appear" with its statement that "you falsely represented yourself to be a citizen of the United States." This written statement, signed by Sherman Kemp, Acting Patrol Agent in Charge, contradicts Hastings' testimony. Furthermore, two weeks into the 18-year-old's detainment, his lawyer presented his birth certificate to ICE, and yet he wasn't released for another week.

Now free, the man says that Hastings' testimony is "a lie. I showed them my documents and I told them right away that I was a U.S. citizen.” The conditions he endured in Border Patrol custody, according to the Dallas News, almost coerced him to choose deportation.

(It's not the first time a U.S. citizen has been detained. In March 2019, a 9-year-old girl was apprehended on her way to school and held for two days. Authorities blamed the girl for giving "inconsistent information." Again, she is 9.)

And in September 2018, Jennifer Wright wrote for Harper's Bazaar:

Hispanic U.S. citizens, some of whom were in the U.S. military, are not being allowed to renew their passports. This is reportedly happening to “hundreds, even thousands” of Latinos, according to a report in the Washington Post. They’re getting letters from the State Department saying it does not believe they are citizens. The government claims their citizenships are fraudulent. “I’ve had probably 20 people who have been sent to the detention center—U.S. citizens,” Jaime Diez, an attorney in Brownsville, told The Washington Post.

The Washington Post also reports on ICE officials coming to citizens' homes and taking their passports away. This is an escalation from a few months ago, when Americans were detained by ICE officials just for speaking Spanish to one another."

In response

A a Twitter thread by @AlexandraErin referred to the officer's testimony as "Kafka By Way of Orwell logic" and excellently describes the situation.

"To the fascist mindset, there's no contradiction here. ... All of this could have been averted, they want us to know, if he had been honest from the start and simply told them he was a citizen. But instead he lied. He was deceitful. They know he lied because he had the cheek to falsely claim he's a citizen. Falsely claiming he's a citizen is something any lying immigrant might do. It's a distinct and separate act, they are sure, from a citizen simply stating the truth. Very much this. They make up their mind about your motives, which colors whatever you say, even if it's the exact right thing and the literal truth, and they will never grant that this is the same as telling them the truth. No contradiction, to them. When things got hot with media scrutiny and politicians getting involved in the teenager's detention, the people he'd pleaded his case to, I guarantee, did not think "Why didn't we listen?" but "Why couldn't he have just told us, the right way, so we'd know he meant it?" "Falsely claiming to be a citizen" is a distinct enough act in their mind that a ~*certain type*~ of person can manage it, even if they happen to be an actual citizen. Which just makes it cheekier, of course. The nerve of making them look foolish by falsely claiming the truth! ... What is truth to a fascist? The truth is what they say, and only when they say it, only when it is useful. ... And so the shock and dismay and outrage of the right when they realize their opponents and targets were telling the truth is genuine, is honest, maybe the most honest thing about them. They feel cheated. They feel... lied to. "What do you mean by telling me the truth, just because it's true? That's a dirty trick. I've never seen anything more underhanded, more unscrupulous..."

She continues by pointing out that, had he chosen to allow the Dept. of Homeland Security to deport him, it may have been difficult for him to re-enter the US, the country where he lives and of which he is a citizen by birth. "The creation of a stateless other is part of the model." Thus, he was not truly "free to leave at any time" (as one Internet commenter tried to argue with her).

His only power to end the torture was to agree that he was An Illegal, agreed he had no right to due process and no right to remain here, and agreed to do what they wanted. It wasn't true, but it was the only answer the torturers would have accepted. Which is the purpose of torture. Not to get at the truth, but to establish something already believed by the torturer as true. ...you can't gain information through torture. It's confirmation bias through pain. The torture ends when the torturer hears the truth. "The truth" therefore must be something the torturer already knows, otherwise how can they know it's true?

2026, Second Trump doesn't want due process:

I need people to understand that this administration’s litigating position is (1) federal law currently mandates the detention, without bond, of every noncitizen who is allegedly unlawfully present and (2) constitutionally, they don’t get a day in court. they’re generally losing, but they’re trying.

[image or embed]

— Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof (@evanbernick.bsky.social) July 16, 2026 at 11:35 AM

War is still about power, not truth

On December 7, 2025, I rewrote and moved this essay to Medium: Political power runs the show without facts.

Related

WATCH: Heavily armed and masked Israeli forces carrying guns have entered Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, ordering staff to vacate and imposing a 45-day closure.

[image or embed]

— Al Jazeera English (@aljazeera.com) September 22, 2024 at 4:46 AM

Oh is the child blood selling guy's jackboot genAI war murder surveillance drone factory hunting out teenagers who have no life experience & no higher learning than a high school diploma to work on their genAI war murder surveillance drones huh okay seems normal and in no way extra evil or anything

[image or embed]

— Erin Fogg says Free Link (@criminalerin.bsky.social) November 2, 2025 at 11:18 AM

"Well, well, well. Look who it is.
The global academic, scientific, and pro-fact community.
I suppose you’ve come to say you’re sorry? I hope so, given your years of sneering and hand-wringing about how I was ruining knowledge. Meanwhile, you turned your information environment into a hypercapitalist post-truth digital snuff film."
— Tom Ellison, Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology, McSweeney's (Short Imagined Monologues), October 27, 2025

Use bipartisan energy to rein in power

Sci-fi author David Brin suggests that both U.S. political parties seize the general opportunity of the moment to institute more checks and balances on the president. Why use up political capital merely exchanging the 45th president for his vice president, Mike Pence?

Specifically, in his Facebook post, Brin proposes enabling a way to delay military orders and send them for congressional committee review; allowing for “the other party” to make the president's appointments for one afternoon a week; and creating a bipartisan "Fact Checking Institute."

During his campaign for office, the 45th president selected Mike Pence to be his vice president "as impeachment insurance," in Brin's analysis. In other words, Brin believes that Pence will also pose significant troubles for Democrats and their agenda, and that Trump "knew what he was doing" in picking Pence to discourage opponents from bringing down Trump.

Some of David Brin's popular books:

Quotes on lying

Robert A. Burton:

"As a lifelong poker player, I have spent considerable time developing a winning strategy, yet I am not a great player. I have long suspected a variety of flaws, but haven't figured out a clear solution. With the recent popularity of televised poker tournaments where the viewers can see the players' hole cards at the start of each hand, the problem has become transparent. The players with the best overall results are those who aggressively make selective large bluffs, a style with which I have never been entirely comfortable.

* * *

Trying to figure out what the other players have turns out to be of less value than just making the large bluff periodically."

Thomas S. Szasz:

It [the term "lying"] comes into play only when the assumption is made that the communicants have pledged themselves to truthfulness. Thus, the term "lying" can be used meaningfully only in situations in which the rules of the game prescribe truthfulness. This is often assumed in everyday human relationships, and especially in those which are emotionally close, such as in marriage and friendship. Perjury is a special kind of lying, committed in a court of law by a person giving testimony. Here the rules of the game are explicitly formulated; lying (perjury) is punishable by legally enforced sanctions.”

Lisa Kogan:

"Honesty is a delightful policy, but I'm here to tell you that without at least a few lies, Thanksgiving with the family would be a thing of the past, first dates would end faster than you can dismiss your biological clock with a jaunty "Que sera, sera... ," every political figure who intentionally linked Iraq with Osama bin Laden would be forced to resign in disgrace, and any number of plastic surgeons throughout the greater Los Angeles area would end their lives in the gutter holding large cardboard signs that read WILL BOTOX FOR FOOD.

* * * 

To this day, Julia believes that Toys "R" Us is only open when my parents visit Manhattan; the shelves are stocked as Grandma and Grandpa's plane touches down and the doors to the store lock as soon as they head back to Detroit.

Here is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: My name is Lisa, and I am a liar, though a good marketing consultant could probably finesse the word into something a bit more palatable: "Reality Stylist" might be good, or "Pinocchiotologist" could work. My mother insists that, at the end of the day, what I am is a storyteller — and she might have a point.

Joan Didion says that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." I think that's right. Forget what I tell cabdrivers for sport or dental hygienists for spin control or "Bambi" readers for peace of mind. It's the lies we tell ourselves that determine the particular arc of our stories."

M. Veera Pandiyan:

Liars, it seems, are wired differently from the rest of us. On the average they have between 22% and 26% more prefrontal white matter and 14% less grey matter.

The study by Dr Yaling Yang, from the psychology department of the USC, and psychology professor Dr Adrian Raine, who is now at University of Pennsylvania, used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to explore differences in brains among pathological liars, anti-social disorder personalities and those who were normal.

According to Dr Raine, more white matter provided liars with the tools necessary to master the complex art of deceit.

“Pathological liars can’t always tell truth from falsehood and contradict themselves in interviews. They are very brazen in terms of their manner, but very cool when talking about this.”

“Lying takes a lot of effort. It’s almost mind reading. You have to be able to understand the mindset of the other person.

“You also have to suppress your emotions or regulate them because you don’t want to appear nervous. There’s quite a lot to do there. You’ve got to suppress the truth,” Dr Raine was quoted as saying in a USC article after the study was published.

He said the more “networking” there was in the prefrontal cortex, the more the person had an upper hand in lying, adding that their verbal skills were higher and that they had a natural advantage.

In normal people, the grey matter helps to keep the impulse to lie in check. With the surplus of white matter and a deficit of grey matter, liars have more tools to lie and fewer moral restraints than normal people.

Sources

Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. pp. 112-113.

Thomas S. Szasz. The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Delta, 1961. p. 246.

"Lies are good for family and friends." Lisa Kogan. Oprah.com.  Sept. 5, 2008.

 

"Inside the Lying Brain." M. Veera Pandiyan. The Star (Malaysia). Aug. 28, 2008.

Quotes on perception and interpretation

Sen. J. William Fulbright:

“...people in different societies look at the same facts and "see" different things, that what they see, or think they see, is largely determined by what they expect to see.

The point is illustrated by an experiment in which a psychologist had two groups of schoolteachers, one Mexican, the other American, look into a device that simultaneously showed a picture of a bullfighter to one eye and a picture of a baseball player to the other. When asked what they had seen, most of the Mexicans said they had seen a bullfighter and most of the Americans said that they had seen a baseball player. Obviously, what each individual saw had a great deal to do with whether he was a Mexican or an American.”

Steven Lukes:

“He recalled James Thurber's encouraging thoughts about the strange pleasure of going blind. As one's eyesight fails, the role of the external world in fixing what one sees declines while that of interpretation increases, so you only have to be optimistic for women to be attractive, buildings to be elegant, the sun to shine.”

Tom Hayden:

"As Fritjof Capra pointed out in The Tao of Physics, the intellect in such Asian philosophy is a means to clear the way for the direct mystical experience of oneness, not a tool for endless filing of data."

Gary Zukav:

"During the Lebanese civil war, a story goes, a visiting American was stopped by a group of masked gunmen. One wrong word could cost him his life.
'Are you Christian or Moslem?' they asked.
'I am a tourist!' he cried.
The way that we pose our questions often illusorily limits our responses."

Sources

Sen. J. William Fulbright. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. p. 176.

Steven Lukes. The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat. London, New York: Verso, 1995, reprinted 2000. p 2.

Tom Hayden. The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. p. 169.

Gary Zukav. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1979. p. 286.

Under Trump 2017, 'We the People' White House petition website is broken (see data)

The U.S. White House website contains a petitions section that allows anyone to create a petition and gather signatures with the goal of obtaining a response from the White House. Suddenly, since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these petitions aren't working. Bug or feature?

2025 note: The site was https://petitions.whitehouse.gov. As it no longer exists, I've removed some of the clickable links.

The rules under the Obama administration, which created the petition functionality: Once a petition is created, its creator must reach two milestones within 30 days. First, the creator is responsible for circulating it to gather the first 150 signatures, as the creator is the only one who initially has the URL of the petition. Second, after the petition has 150 signatures, it will be published to the White House petitions webpage so that anyone can find it, and, if it reaches 100,000 signatures, the White House will respond to it. All petitions expire after 30 days, meaning they will no longer be available on the White House petitions webpage and will no longer be signable even if you know the direct URL.

The site promises: “Petitions will only be removed under the Moderation Policy — no petition will be removed because of the viewpoint it expresses.” This assurance was still available as of Jan. 27, 2017, one week after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President. Nonetheless, a number of people noticed that certain petitions did not seem to be working.

For example, a petition called "Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities" was created on Jan. 21, 2017. Two days later, the Independent reported that this petition

"received hundreds of tweets from proud signees but the official count (at the time of writing) reads: '27 signed'." Jillian Steinhauer wrote for Hyperallergic on Jan. 25 that it "shows only 44 signatures, despite hundreds of people having tweeted that they signed it. Many have noticed the discrepancy, with one tweeter claiming that the petition had nearly 100,000 signatures yesterday [Jan. 24]; another says the number was originally in the tens of thousands. The other petition shows 734 signatures, a small climb from the 724 listed earlier today, but does not seem to be accurately counting those who’ve signed based on the sharing rate suggested by social media. It also appears to have been set up only after a previous petition vanished."

Update: On Jan. 28, the count was at 176 and it was visible on the White House petitions webpage. An attempt to sign it was successful, incrementing the count to 177.

Not all petitions were working as of Jan. 28, however. For example, a petition titled "End the media blackout on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)" created on Jan. 25 still displayed only 1 signer as of Jan. 28, despite repeated attempts by several people to sign it. Accordingly, it showed the counter: "Needs 99,999 signatures by February 24, 2017 to get a response from the White House." Similarly, "To explain to the American people why President Donald J. Trump is such a needy little bitch," created Jan. 23, only had 1 signature five days after its creation, despite having a link distributed in a BuzzFeed article. That, to be fair, runs afoul of the site's 'Terms of Participation' banning "Defamatory or fraudulent statements" and "Terms commonly understood to constitute profanity or abusive or degrading slurs or epithets," but that does not fully explain why the petition still exists and is simply apparently not working.

Blake Montgomery wrote for BuzzFeed: "President Obama’s administration created We The People in 2011...whether the Trump administration will respond to petitions is unconfirmed. On the day of his inauguration, Trump’s administration archived all existing petitions on the platform." In other words, the Trump administration is not accepting new signatures on any petition created during the final days of the Obama administration, and one may speculate that they may not intend to respond to any of those petitions that may have reached the 100,000-signature goal. In that article, a White House spokesperson was quoted as attributing the malfunction to a technical bug: “It’s a question of high volume at the end of the day, but the signatures are being captured. Because of high volume they’re having to change how they’re being captured.”

Under this administration, technical difficulties — or, depending on your interpretation, diminished accountability to public comment — are not limited to the petition website. "Since at least the end of the Obama administration," Tyler Pager wrote for the Boston Globe on Jan. 26, "the White House’s phone line for comments has not been taking calls. It is unclear exactly when the line was closed, and it is equally unclear when it will be back." A recorded message directs callers "to send us a comment online...or send us a message through Facebook messenger.'"

As quoted in an LA Times article about the closing of the telephone comment line on Mon. Jan. 23, the first business day after the inauguration, press assistant Giovanna Coia said, “We’re still learning how to work our computers."

Update: People were calling the Capitol about their political concerns even though they couldn't call the White House. U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) tweeted at the end of the day on Feb. 2: "The last three days have been the BUSIEST IN CAPITOL SWITCHBOARD HISTORY. By almost double."

The following table shows all available petitions on the White House website as of Friday night, Jan. 27 and continuing through Sat. morning, Jan. 28. During this brief time period (about 15 hours, overnight), only one petition newly reached the 150-signature threshhold to be published to the site. This was the "Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities" petition referenced above, suggesting that it may be necessary for the White House website to receive negative press from an internationally recognized newspaper like The Independent before any specific petition will be published. Also during this time, no petitions newly crossed the 100,000 signature threshhold. Only two had over 100,000 signatures, and both of them had been created on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, suggesting that the new administration had not yet begun to change the way the petition site worked.

The domain WHPetitions.info, purchased in 2013, contains simple content that appears to confirm the above. It says: "Helping the White House keep its promise" and as of Jan. 28, 2017 it indicates that "0 White House petitions have met their signature thresholds". It appears that some values are supposed to auto-calculate, as suggested by what appears to be bogus output as a result of calculating with 0. "The White House has responded to 0 of them (-9223372036854775808%) with an average response time of -106752 days". The site credits Eli Dourado, whose active Twitter account identifies him as an "economist working on accelerating the pace of technological change."

[By the way, an update: The Biden administration did not resurrect this website.]

Petitions on the W.H. website in late Jan. 2017
Column 1 has the petition name, Column 2 has the number of signatures as of a certain date, and Column 3 has the incremented number of signatures as of the next day

Petition title	Signatures as of Fri 1/27, 8 pm ET	Signatures as of Sat 1/28, 11 am ET
Immediately release Donald Trump's full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance.	391,917	404,078
Divest or put in a blind trust all of the President's business and financial assets.	121,885	126,395
Donald Trump: Resign as President of the United States in Violation of the Emoluments Clause. Release Your Tax Returns	23,163	24,417
Let American Farmers Grow Hemp Once Again to Create Jobs and Rebuild the Rural Economy	20,690	21,389
Demand Trump administration add LGBT rights, climate change, and civil rights back to list of issues on wh.gov site	4,959	6,422
Repeal the 1986 Hughes amendment	3,466	3,588
Repeal the NFA	2,876	3,143
Investigate Hillary Clinton for crimes committed against the People and Government of the United States.	1,688	1,811
Do not defund the NEA or NEH	1,027	1,128
Demand justice for international students affected by ACICS' loss of accreditation power	916	945
Arrest and detainment of singer Madonna.	605	625
Charge Madonna with Terrorist Threats against the president of the United States of America.	568	599
Issue an International Arrest Warrant for George Soros	507	545
Boost the American Economy through Climate Action	440	452
Immediately abolish the Net Worth Sweep of Fannie Mae(FNMA) and Freddie Mac(FMCC).	327	335
Restore Education as a Constitutional Right & Protect Medical Freedom	296	307
Change the law putting a financial strain on many disabled veterans	294	298
Improved Medicare for All	285	308
Pledge to continue funding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities	252	339
Restore and maintain accurate, science-based information on climate change to the White House website.	285	306
We the decent Venezuelan people ask President Donald Trump to help recoup Venezuela's sovereignty, liberty and democracy	281	286
Call on the The Republic of Cameroon government to stop the killing and marginalization of Anglophone Cameroonians.	217	223
Reinstate Lt. Col. Terry Lakin into the U.S. Army with full rank, pay, benefits and pension immediately.	171	200
Total signatures across these 23 petitions (Total change overnight: +21,024 signatures, or an average of 914 signatures per petition)	577,115	598,139

 

One newly published petition on the W.H. website in late Jan. 2017
Column one has the petition name, column two would represent the number of signatures as of Friday night and this column is deliberately empty because the number is not known because the petition was not yet published, and column three has the number of signatures as of the next day

Petition title	Signatures as of Fri 1/27, 8 pm ET	Signatures as of Sat 1/28, 11 am ET
Preserve the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities	Unknown	176

2018 and 2019 updates

No petitions were given responses in 2017, although some had crossed the threshold number for earning a response. Around the end of the year, the following message appeared on the homepage:

To improve this site's performance, the platform is currently down for maintenance and will return in late January [2018].

All existing petitions and associated signatures have been preserved and will be available when the site is relaunched. Following the site's relaunch, petitions that have reached the required number of signatures will begin receiving responses.

When visited Feb. 27, the petition site was back online. Seven petitions had received responses from the White House.

By May 4, no additional petitions had received responses. There were 44 active petitions, 13 of which had long since reached their signature threshhold and were due for White House responses, and the remainder of which were still in their 30-day period to reach the threshhold.

By February 22, 2019, no additional petitions had received responses. There were 71 active petitions, 27 of which had reached their signature threshold and were due for White House responses.