On Saturday @UMich had a “comeback” commencement for the Class of 2020, who lost their original ceremony to COVID.
Speaker was Anthony Fauci.
His message: “Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.”
Via @LainaStebbinsMI https://t.co/GP2eF8kA1R
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) May 9, 2022
I will always cherish the years I spent as a Michigander, but I can’t say I’m sorry I left when I did…
The University of Michigan’s 2020 graduates on Saturday finally received the Big House ceremony they were denied two years ago, with Dr. Anthony Fauci fittingly giving the “comeback” commencement speech for the students whose senior year at the university was upended by COVID-19.
Meanwhile, a caravan of cars and trucks circled Michigan Stadium, emblazoned with messages like, “F-CK FAUCI!”, “Fauci killed my mom,” “arrest Fauci now!” and “Fauci = Dr. Death” while more protesters gathered in front of a stadium gate…
Seemingly acknowledging COVID-19 conspiracies during his speech, Fauci urged graduates to not turn a blind eye to “egregious distortions of reality.”
“Sadly, elements of our society have grown increasingly unfazed by a cacophony of falsehoods and lies that often stand largely unchallenged, ominously leading to an insidious acceptance of what I call the ‘normalization of untruths,’” Fauci said.
He said that the lies are propagated through social media, news and even elected officials.
“The outrage and dissent against this alarming trend has mostly been muted and mild,” Fauci said, warning that continued indifference will lead to a society in which “veracity becomes subservient to propaganda.”
“Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths. Because if you do, lies become dominant and reality is distorted. And then truth means nothing, integrity means nothing, facts mean nothing,” he continued.
A total of 2,444,891 Michiganders have tested positive for COVID-19 and 36,064 have died from the virus since March 2020. There have been about 515 million confirmed cases worldwide and 6.2 million deaths, with the United States recording 81.5 million confirmed cases and 996,030 deaths.
Michigan currently has an overall vaccination rate (one or more doses) of 67%, putting it in the bottom third of state vaccination rates. About 78% of the entire United States population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine…
And sometimes, it’s difficult to tell when crazy ends and evil takes over…
The organizer — per @LainaStebbinsMI — was Michigan Republican Lena Epstein.
Name may ring a bell. She ran for Congress here a few years ago, got some national attention.
Via @joshtpm https://t.co/uwxhQviVIX
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) May 9, 2022
In the interview, she says she wants to minimize federal funding for the university, bc it allows federal control.
Context: @umich perennially among top recipients of federal research dollars. https://t.co/sN79t5fWtu
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) May 9, 2022
On a related note, current regent @JordanAckerMI had some thoughts about the broader political situation in Michigan — and the implications of this November's election for the university — here: https://t.co/rMqM1F1061
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) May 9, 2022
Boots on the Ground Fundraising: Where We’ve Been & Where We’re Going
NotMax
COVID statistics increasingly divergent and their reporting erratic. Site I have favored all along, as of one minute ago, lists U.S. cumulative deaths as 1,024,736.
SpaceUnit
I generally do not consider myself a person who condones violence.
And yet I am hoping that in the next six to twelve months Anthony Fauci will punch some asshole right in the fucking mouth.
debbie
The cheers greeting Fauci were stupendous!
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I’m so sick of these people. In Lehigh County Pennsylvania (Allentown) the D.A. there is investigating people who drop off more than one ballot at a drop off spot. It’s altogether lawful for people to have others drop off their ballots, but now people might end up feeling intimidated into not doing that. If they can’t drive themselves over, or walk to the dropoff spot, some people might end up not voting at all. And that’s what they want.
bbleh
Fauci, wadda mensch! He is a fucking icon. He deserves a statue somewhere, preferably public, medical, and federal.
It is entirely clear he has, to quote Charlie Pierce, looked in his big bag of fks and discovered he has no more to give (and there’s a significant amount of this in JoeBiden as well), but damn! That he has hung on — though the T**** administration no less — is borderline superhuman.
All praise to Tony Fauci.
MobiusKlein
Normalization of untruth is their M.O.
See their BS about evolution, climate change, Laffer curve, so called voter fraud, and so on.
We used to laugh about Conservapedia. Turns out the joke was on us.
Ohio Mom
It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but I have enough ethnic chauvinism in me that when I read the name “Lena Epstein,” I cringed and said Oy gavalt!
It’s very nice Michigan gave their alums a make-up graduation, and perfect that they had Fauci speak.
Brachiator
Brave and necessary words in these strange and troubled times.
bbleh
@MobiusKlein: No. It is still to laugh. We may have underestimated their determination, but laughing at them is nearly nuclear. They have no defense, because most of them know, or at least suspect, that they deserve it. And as much as it enrages them (and they’re going to be enraged anyway — they’re rage junkies), it also discombobulates them.
Laugh away, say I.
Tenar Arha
@Ohio Mom: did you see the 2018 Josh Marshall background on her? ~*whoosh facepalm shonda etc.*~
Cameron
It’s pretty discouraging – there seems to be an unending supply of these creatures, as if there’s a wingnut 3D printer that can crank them out on demand.
Cameron
@Tenar Arha: It looks like she started her flight to the right by covering herself in Santorum……
Ohio Mom
@Tenar Arha: Yes, I saw the Josh Marshall piece. I did some googling to see why she left her Democractic upbringing aside but I couldn’t find an explanation. Maybe it’s her husband, maybe he’s the bad influence?
phdesmond
Steve Schmidt
@SteveSchmidtSES
.
@SarahPalinUSA
You and I have unfinished business. I’ll do everything I can to make sure you never hold a position of responsibility in the United States Congress. You are an unstable, narcissistic, ignorant, grifting quitter. Magnificent, Majestic, Alaska deserves better.
MobiusKlein
@bbleh: I have given up on laughing at their idiocy. The only change I notice is I feel better for a short while. and they carry on without regard.
They are without shame, intellectual honesty.
Ivan X
@Ohio Mom: I’ll join you in that.
bbleh
@MobiusKlein: But lacking shame or intellectual honesty (or, frankly, the capacity for it), it’s only laughter that penetrates their bubble. (And they DO deserve it. I’m not JUST being mean.)
And yeah, it makes me feel better too. And that’s a good thing, not only in fairness, but also to keep up the fight.
different-church-lady
@phdesmond: Remind me to never piss off Steve Schmidt.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@phdesmond: I’ve been cheering Schmidt on because I well and truly hate Meghan McCain, but I did chuckle at this bit from a NY Mag write-up of his twitter rants of this weekend
at first I thought the NYM writer was calling Schmidt’s tweets a blog post, but apparently Schmidt started a substack this weekend where, among other things, he confirmed a story about a long-term affair McCain had. If I ever heard that story from ’08, I’d forgotten it (and his post could be about one-third the length it is).
gene108
@MobiusKlein:
I started reading a book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, by Jordan Ellenberg.
The author goes into the origins of the Laffer curve sketched on a napkin, in 1974, in which Laffer, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Jude Wanniski of the Wall St. Journal discussed over lunch President Ford’s tax plan. Laffer draws his curve, which shows tax rate and tax revenue are non-linear. Tax too little and revenue goes down, and tax too much revenue goes down. Anti-tax nuts like Wanniski ran with it to push for massive tax cuts.
I don’t agree that Laffer was an innocent bystander, whose idea was misappropriated. He’s done well in conservative circles over the years thanks to his curve.
The author argues that the Laffer curve is just a tool to conceptualize the relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. He never said what the tax rate should be.
I found this to be a different take on the Laffer curve than I’ve usually heard.
phdesmond
@different-church-lady:
advisable, eh?
mrmoshpotato
The University of Michigan put Fauci’s commencement address on their YouTube page. Go Blue!
Kelly
@gene108: I read long ago that the Laffer Curve was known to economists decades before Laffer. It was regarded as a trivial observation not worth attaching anyone’s name to. The data did not suggest we need to cut taxes.
bbleh
@gene108: Uh, consistent with the whole cocktail napkin thing, the entire point of the Laffer Curve — which certainly was not original to him — is that there CAN be too much taxation, there CAN be a point at which taxation becomes so onerous that it reduces GDP, but NOT that we know where that point is, nor that we were there.
But consistent with Republican doctrine, Reagan and his followers deliberately — very deliberately — misinterpreted the message. They used it as “academic evidence” that Taxation Is Bad. They received and used it IN BAD FAITH. They wanted to hear X, and whenever they could they interpreted what they heard as X. This is how Republicans operate.
It really is important to understand that they are not intellectually honest. On the contrary: they openly deride and despite intellectualism. They repeat words that they think sound like what they want to hear They echo noises they like. That is all.
(And as to an actual Laffer curve, let us recall that, in the late 1950s, under a Republican president, the highest marginal tax rate in the US was over 90 percent, and yet somehow the Greatest Economic Engine In History Under God™ didn’t collapse.)
eddie blake
@bbleh: dude, they lie about anything and everything under the sun; why would taxes be any different?
Caphilldcne
Thanks for this thread. Proud of my alma mater! Go Blue!
Fake Irishman
As a UM PhD, I’m not surprised by the choice of speaker or the protest (I did protest the incoming governor Snyder in 2011 after his first budget gutted education and many other things; there were 1500 of us, and the only arrests were a pair of Larouche disciples who set up a table and got busted for blocking traffic.
bbleh
@eddie blake: no disagreement there. Because their lies, you see, are in the service of a Greater Truth™. And also Jesus.
MobiusKlein
@bbleh: The Laffer curve is an example where they take a trivially true statement – Functions have a maximum value – and use it to justify a much more specific result – Reducing the current tax rate will increase tax revenue.
It was always a mathematical sleight of hand, from napkin on. If I was an econ professor, I would give the person a D-. Maybe F+
Fake Irishman
@Fake Irishman:
FWIW the editor of a Michigan sports blog I read, Seth Fisher, went to high school with Epstein and was a friend of hers. He used a tweeststorm described her transformation in 2018 when she was running for Congress. It was a profoundly sad story about her ambition outstripping any ethics she had. It clearly was painful for Seth to write.
(He and his colleagues are utter mensches, bleed UM, and are quite profound at times in their sports writing. the blog focuses primarily on football and basketball, but definitely appreciates all UM sports. One of their contributors wrote an incredible front page piece about the women’s gymnastics team clinching the national championship by conquering the balance beam called simply “Steel.”)
Tenar Arha
@Ohio Mom: No idea…Marshall said Dinesh D’Souza “radicalized” her, but doesn’t mention how THAT happened. Could be a husband/a nasty activist gave her a push/a bad media diet—even possibly just the same thing that happened to so many white people, her internalized racism manifested when the black guy she may/may not have voted for actually used his power & did everything better than either of the Bushes.
Fake Irishman
@Fake Irishman:
Final plug: I had regent Acker’s big sister in class at UM. I had a lot of respect for her, and later she was very proud of her little brother.
Fake Irishman
@MobiusKlein:
it was always interesting to me what sorts of answers economists gave when asked what the maximizing rate for revenue was. Real academic economists either said they didn’t know, or suggested empirical studies hinted it was might be around 70 percent. Right wing hacks all said 20 percent. LOL.
MobiusKlein
@Fake Irishman: I find the premise nonsense. Why should we optimize for a tax rate that gives maximum government revenue at all?
There could be 100 competing reasons to choose a different tax rate, even granting the massive simplification of reducing it to a single number. Maybe the social cost of inequality means a tax rate higher than optimum has a negative net impact. Maybe a tax rate below the optimum is better, because folks get to spend money how they like directly.Maybe there are multiple maxima?
But no, the answer is overdetermined, the answer known before the question is posed.
Martin
Pro tip for Dem messaging. The GOP is painting Dems as pedophiles and baby murderers. You can’t counter that by complaining about stare decisis.
The GOP has made the agenda quite clear: they are losing demographics and have decided it’s a supply chain problem, and it’s your daughter that they have decided will be the open factory for the white babies that they need. That would make for quite a visual in a political ad, white women lined up like machines, depositing their newborn widget onto the GOP assembly line. Here’s your voice over:
“whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to adopt had become virtually nonexistent”
mrmoshpotato
OT – How can you tell an ad is for a scam? Newt Gingrich is in it!
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Newt Gingrich — the bargain basement Mike Lindell?
//
Mai Naem mobile
I hope Steve Schmidt gives us more info on the connections between the Russians and the GOP and,more importantly, i hope it gets picked up by the MSM. Its jusr not normal to have so many people from another country, especially an adversary, involved in a major political party.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: I consider them both to equally be trash.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@Fake Irishman: One thing I’ve noticed about college sports fans is that a large preponderance are RWNJ. I’m sure they spend all kinds of time railing against the evils of academia indoctrinating liberalism into everyone and everything…except that the university they root for which is the most virtuous institution on the face of the earth.
I grew up in Grand Rapids and know lots of UM fans (none of whom went there) who lord their status as the “Harvard of the Midwest” over those of us who chose MSU (I went to grad school at State). Most of said friends are Reagan Republicans turned RWNJs. They’ll probably vote for this woman for regent because she’ll have an R next to her name. Then wonder why their status as the “Harvard of the Midwest” goes bye bye when she succeeds in reducing the University’s funding, and meddles with what can be taught there, etc., which will undoubtedly affect it’s academic standing.
As for what’s happened to the State… it’s tragic but I don’t know what to do to combat it. The RWNJs I know there are convinced that emulating Mississippi is the road to economic prosperity. You can point out that Mississippi is the poorest State in the nation and the wealthiest States tend to be Blue but facts don’t matter. They have a dumb meme to counter every argument and those are the font of all wisdom, not some guy’s “facts”.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@Fake Irishman: To be clear the MSU fan community has the same RWNJ problem. I’m not going after UM fans, but I do occasionally visit MGoBlig after big wins against you guys to bask in a little schadenfreude and it’s pretty clear both fan communities have a RWNJ problem. The blog I read (The Only Colors) polices the crap out of political commentary but just enough of it bleeds through that you can see who the nuts are.
evodevo
@Kelly: What it illustrated was, the upper tax rate should be ~70%, above which state revenue would supposedly decrease…well, NO GOPer was going to go with that, so they all went with taking taxes out altogether lol – which, of course, reduces state revenue to….nothing….