Wait until he hears about Roundup.
Posts by Norah MacKendrick
New piece! Norah MacKendrick on Make America Healthy Again, its attitude toward science, its defining characteristics, and how it fits within Trump's illiberal second administration. Check it out! @nmackend.bsky.social @ieres-gwu.bsky.social
This is my first time writing for the Illiberalism Studies Program. Not sure why RFK Jr. looks so pained in this image. Maybe he's unhappy with my representation of the movement? Read up to understand how MAHA is not anti-science but defines a new, illiberal science to implement a MAGA agenda. #MAHA
Office of Personal Management is aiming high in their training of our civil servants by the sounds of things. 😳
V. cool data +: “Key unknowns include emission inventories for rockets and satellites, lack of a systematic observational survey of mesospheric metals, altitude-time ablation profiles, chemical lifetimes, particle size-composition distributions, and transport pathways into the lower stratosphere.”
Screenshot that reads "New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti"
How to explain this headline? This goes beyond so-called journalistic objectivity. I suspect NYT enjoys a little rage bait. #pretti #newyorktimes @nytpitchbot.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...
“LET US OUT!”
women & children scream for help inside a detention camp in TEXAS, where private prisons like core civic make billions of taxpayer dollars holding them while abusing, neglecting them, refusing them health care, feeding them dirty food & water, etc.
In our name🇺🇸
I just wrote a @theactionnetwork.bsky.social letter: Tell Delta: ICE OUT NOW. Write one here: actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...
I just wrote a @theactionnetwork.bsky.social letter: Tell Enterprise: ICE OUT NOW. Write one here: actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...
Screenshot of a story called The Dangerous Paradox of AI Abundance from New Yorker App.
Correct. But what’s with the “WHAT IF”?? www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...
Ok, but EPA at least show some pictures of what you mean
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
This is amazing.
It’s about time we had a men’s section in the cereal aisle.
Beef tallow is a small part of the report. What is more “interesting” is that RFK promised to end industry influence over dietary guidelines but his scientific panel takes money from cattle + dairy industries. And 🥛 and 🥩 just happen to be at the top of the new inverted pyramid.
So should you freak out about glyphosate residues in your food? Yeah, a little bit. But the solution isn’t shelling out for so-called glyphosate-free food. The solution is to push the EPA to re-evaluate this pesticide. I have zero faith that this will happen under a Trump administration.
Glyphosate is a big problem full stop. It comes down to two things: 1. lack of independent research establishing its safety and 2. the huge volumes of this pesticide applied in agriculture all over the world. #glyphosate #roundup #pesticides www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/c...
If you VPN into Canada you can watch the 60 Minutes CECOT story here (for now). Global TV appears to have posted the original tape by accident watch.globaltv.com/series/2893d...
This will be an interesting test of MAHA’s power. Will we see, in a month or two, a kind of capitulation to Zeldin, in the interest of keeping MAGA-MAHA aligned? Hard to imagine MAHA winning real reforms at the EPA.
What podcast is this? Looking for original source.
If you want to understand the ideas behind this administration, read this and Field’s new book, Furious Minds. Essential reading for understanding the logic behind the MAGA machine.
I was able to interview Indigenous photographer Cara Romero about her stunning art in her "First American Doll" series.
If you need a visual pick-me-up this is it.
19thnews.org/2025/12/firs...
If you read/cite/teach from journals, read this thread. We need librarians more than ever. ⬇️
The chemical lobby has been spending millions of dollars to change the Toxic Substances Control Act. That's the main law that works to protect people from harmful chemicals.
What does industry want? They want less oversight and less concern for your health. #badidea
Lawfare Lecture: The Making of the MAGA New Right, with Laura Field 10 DEC 4 PM Laura Field will teach a 6 part class on the conservative intellectual movement and how it has shaped Donald Trump's presidency as a part of the Lawfare Lecture series. REGISTER
Beginning on Dec. 10, @lkatfield.bsky.social, the author of “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” will teach a 6-part class on the conservative intellectual movement and how it has shaped Donald Trump’s presidency as a part of the Lawfare Lecture series.
Once mocked as unsophisticated, Donald Trump in his second term has put forward an ambitious vision to reshape America.
Surrounding the president is a loose network of intellectuals who provide his policies with a philosophy. An important new book maps it out.
“Few books in political theory foreground the author’s biography this much. But it lands.”
My LARB review of Furious Minds by Laura Field. A terrific book. @princetonupress.bsky.social:
lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-mo...
I have been writing about New Right intellectuals since 2019. The most common response I get when I mention this to liberals is something along the lines of "Trumpy intellectuals? Now that's an oxymo-ron!" or "Hahaha, I think you mean dumb fascists!" While the impulse is understandable, it's also mistaken and counterproductive. Many on the left assume that the only serious reason to support the GOP has to do with finance and tax returns, and that right-wing voters are racists. But people's motives are mixed, and America's reactionary intellectuals are armed with more than greed and preju-dice. They also have reasons and arguments that they appear to care about, whole epochs and libraries full, ready-to-hand. What the writer Matthew Rose says about the radical right is true of the New Right, too: Almost everything written about the "alternative right" has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of seductive power.* The New Right's questions, ideas, and arguments may not be of the sort to convince the average New York Times subscriber, but they are eftec-tive in their contexts, and it's not like they are easy to refute. Education and specialization being what they are today, the people I focus on in this book know more than your average JD or political science PhD about early American political history and about the history of the so-called West, and of course many of them have other specialties and areas of expertise besides. I am generally not an admirer of the people I write about here, but it would be foolish to deny that they are smart and
INTRODUCING THE MAGA NEW RIGHT 25 well-informed in their own way. It's obviously possible to be highly knowledgeable and to have terrible judgment or dangerous politics. To presume otherwise— to believe that there is nothing to learn from these thinkers and no compelling noneconomic reasons to support something like Trumpism-is naive and dangerous. It misunderstands and fetishizes intelligence, by presuming that real brains never chase after raw power. It fails to see the possibility and power of genuine intellectual fanaticism—and the allure of people who have strong convictions backed by strong arguments. And it assumes a deep sameness about one's fellow citizens and so refuses to contend with real, protracted ideological disagreement and conflict. In other words, it refuses to reckon with what might be the greatest challenge posed by political life: the fact that people really do think differently and disagree, about just about everything, and especially about the most important things, like the meaning of life, God, and the soul, and what is good. Above all else, the naive view overestimates liberalism's immediate appeal and underestimates liberalism's fragility. Growing right-wing extremism has not emerged in a vacuum but in many instances is a re-sponse, however misguided, to real problems, and to the real vulnerabilities of liberal democracy. It reflects some of the actual failures of modern liberal politics and economics, of modern liberal culture, and of the corporate neoliberal academy. One of the major advantages of spending time with the New Right is that it allows us to see these challenges more clearly, and to think through future possibilities for a pluralistic liberal order more deeply. And with some urgency.
I'm a few chapters into @lkatfield.bsky.social's great new book on MAGA intellectuals and I thought the close of her introductory chapter made a very important point about the dangers of talking about MAGA as it it is an intellectual desert. It's more like a refulgent swamp of shitty, toxic ideas.
BREAKING: A federal court blocked the Trump-Vance administration’s attempt to cut off food assistance for 42 million people during the ongoing government shutdown.
We'll keep fighting to ensure that federal programs serve their lawful purpose: to help, not harm, people and communities.
These programs are amazing: fresh food for those on public assistance and more money in farmers’ pockets. Now the Big Beautiful Bill is kicking thousands of people, just like @writingelizabeth.bsky.social here, off of #SNAP. And the shutdown threatens everyone’s benefits. Cruelty is the point.