Tag: books
Big Lie: What The Faked MAHA Report Shows About AI (And Bobby)

Big Lie: What The Faked MAHA Report Shows About AI (And Bobby)

I had a friend from my time living in Sag Harbor who is sadly gone from us now, Anthony “Tony” Brandt, who was married to my equally good friend, Lorraine Dusky. I bring up Tony today because he and the way he lived his life illustrate what is so different about us – me and Tracy and Tony and Lorraine and you and yours – and what we are constantly told is the ever-encroaching power, or threat, or utility – we’re always being told something different – of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Tony was a man of books, thousands and thousands of books, which he had acquired over his lifetime. Walking into his and Lorraine’s home on High Street in Sag Harbor was like entering a library. Every wall was covered with floor to ceiling bookshelves. There were more on the glassed-in porch on the front of the house, as well as piles of them out there, and more upstairs in his study, and more in the downstairs extra bedroom, and no doubt more in rooms I had not been in.

Nearly every time you walked into the house, Tony was in an armchair in the living room across from the couch under a lamp, reading. He wrote several books of his own and for years was a journalist writing for Esquire, Connoisseur, The Atlantic, American Heritage, Military History magazine, Psychology Today, and also wrote the books column in Men’s Journal. You could see among the titles what his interests were – lots of American and world history, a complete personal library on Jefferson, military matters including history, tactics, and strategy, and apparently every other book that caught his eye at the yard and estate sales that proliferated in the Hamptons during the summer.

I wondered over the years what Tony did with all those books besides read them. It was clear that they informed his own writing, but there were so many of them it was obvious that he had not collected them for a specific purpose. He had accumulated and read those books because they made him who he was. Any conversation with Tony contained stuff from his books – not the kind of self-conscious specific references that scholars are wont to make; he made casual note of something he had read that touched on the subject at hand.

The general sense you got from talking with him, which I spent hours doing over the years, or simply being around him was that he was not a man of literature so much as he was a man of knowledge which he accumulated right along with his books. His library was as extensive as he was fascinating to be with.

But it was more than knowledge he took from all those books. He took from them not only facts and scholarship and analysis. He gathered up what the books’ authors had to say about their subjects and the world around them, the ineffable sensibility and intelligence that went beyond facts, even beyond the subjects the authors wrote about.

There is the word: intelligence. It doesn’t come just from the words printed on paper between covers. It comes from within the writers, and when their books are good – and most of those Tony had chosen for his shelves were very good – what is within the writers translates into the reader, into Tony. That is why what Tony took from his thousands of books could only be described as ineffable, because it was beyond description except by his presence, the self of Tony Brandt.

It’s also why artificial intelligence will never be the threat to humankind that so many people apparently think it will be. The subject of AI popped up last week with the publication of the RFK Jr. MAHA report that had the subhed of “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” (emphasis in the original.) As you probably know by now, the report was rife with studies that turned out not to exist, and in one case, an author of a study who was made up. As Rolling Stone helpfully summed up, “The MAHA Report was also riddled with broken links, incorrect authors, and other erroneous attributions.” The conservative think tank, the CATO Institute, of all places, went further, concluding that “The data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions.”

All the coverage of the MAHA report pointed out that at least some of the citations appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence, with some of them containing the telltale notation, “oaicite,” connoting something generated by ChatGTP, which is owned by OpenAI.

So, here we have what was intended to be a landmark study that featured “authors” including the secretaries of the departments of HHS, Education, HUD, Veterans Affairs, EPA, and Agriculture, in addition to Russell Vought, the director of Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the White House all-the-time-and-everywhere-jack-of-all-trades adviser on everything from immigration to national security to the budget. The report is a mess because of arrogance and laziness on the part of RFK Jr. and other “authors” who not only couldn’t bring themselves to take the time to study the subject matter, but did not even read the report once it was published.

And AI was right in the middle of the whole thing.

I read a good description today of what artificial intelligence is by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. “AI is being built, even more than most of us realize,” Marshall wrote, “by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced will be “privately owned and sold to us.”

Which happened to me today, as a matter of fact. My Google Mail account recently became infected with some sort of AI product owned by Google called “Genesis,” which provided me each and every time I began an email with this unwanted prompt: “Help me write Alt+H.” I didn’t want to be so prompted, and so I went looking on the internet for how to cause the prompt to go away, which took me down a rabbit hole of solutions involving the “settings” tab of Gmail. I unclicked everything they suggested to no avail. The prompt refused to go away. And today, I discovered why. A new message in a little box appeared within the Gmail page notifying me that my “trial” use of Genesis on Gmail was about to expire, but I could buy the service by clicking “here.” I hit “cancel” and look forward to the day that my Genesis trial will be over so I can write emails without being asked if I want “help.”

Doubtlessly, what Genesis has been doing is recording every email I have ever written and preparing what Marshall called the “statistical associations between different words and patterns” so they could provide me with suggestions for sentences that would appear to echo my email “style” (or whatever) from before. As if what I want to do is write every new email so that it is similar to every other email I have already written.

That is just one of the massive holes in AI – the assumption that what human beings want to do is repeat themselves, which in my experience over the last 70 years or so is exactly 180 degrees from what I have observed human beings wanting to do. Fashion, for just one example, would die if people wanted to put the same clothes on every day. So would supermarkets and restaurants, which are in the business of offering you new and different choices for what to cook or eat.

But the weakness of AI goes way beyond its obvious basis in repetition and the apparent tendency of AI to “hallucinate” facts and references when there are none, as shown in the MAHA report.

AI will never be able to feel. AI will never, in short, be Tony Brandt. AI will never be able to take all that information from all those books on Tony’s shelves – and there is evidence that is exactly what AI companies are doing by copying information from books and magazines and internet sources into huge databases from which they can generate their repetitive “help” for us today and in the future.

AI can copy all the sentences and words it wants, but it will never be able to achieve anything resembling something as simple as emphasis – that is, synthesizing the information and applying experience from a human life to choose which fact or what “study” is more important than another except by using statistics or by emphasis according to repetition and usage, by applying numbers to create “solutions” that would in a human being come from within.

Ask yourself this: of the books or articles or poems you have read, or the music you have listened to, or the movies you have watched, what changed you? The assessments made by AI will never be changed except in ways that can be expressed mathematically within its system, by counting things and adding them up, or assessing the importance of something by what it costs – if it’s more expensive, it’s better; if it’s cheaper, it’s not worth as much.

There is also the matter of changing one’s mind. If you assess something and come to a conclusion based on the information you have, and then you come upon new and different information, you may change your mind about the subject. AI can presumably do this by accumulating information, adding to it, and changing because of the added information.

But what if your assessment is one of what might be called a human value? In my life, I have personally seen people who had been racists since childhood change their beliefs about Black people because of their lived experience knowing and working with them, or by becoming friends, or even falling in love with someone of a different race. How does AI factor that into its computations?

Because that’s what we’re talking about in the end: mathematical computations. If you use this word after that word again and again, it becomes either your common usage or your style. But words arranged in patterns can be serious, or ironic, or sarcastic, or even funny. Math doesn’t work with patterns to achieve humor or sarcasm. Math achieves repetition because it has been taught to apply a value: repetition is good, so use again.

Which is as good a definition of humanness in the accumulation of knowledge in the form of words as I can think of, other than in this way: Tony Brandt. Every time I walked into his house on High Street in Sag Harbor, I knew the experience would be different, because Tony would have read a new book or books, or something in the New York Review of Books, or a column in the Times, or a poem in the East Hampton Star, or even something in the tide tables of the Sag Harbor Express that changed him in some way that would delight me and Tracy and the rest of us in new and wonderful ways.

Let’s see AI try to replicate that.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

a library corner with a book

Under This Bully, Not Even Libraries Are Safe

There’s no escaping Donald Trump. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. Let’s face it, everyone needs an escape now and then — from work, kids, chores. And we all find that peace in different ways and different spaces: walking in nature, listening to music, snuggling up in a library corner with a book.

Even those who feel kindly toward our president must occasionally find him and his gift of being in your face 24/7 exhausting and relish a chance to recharge. I’m certain that Americans who aren’t in his fan club crave a rest, if only to find the energy to fight another day.

No safe space is free from the grip of the Trump administration, which is gobbling up more territory with each passing day.

The attack on libraries hits especially hard for a book nerd let loose with a library card at the age of 3. Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library was certainly my happy space and a needed escape when a large family in a modest rowhouse provided a little too much stimulation. And, oh, the surprises I found there: lectures, films and books I stumbled on that sated my curiosity on every topic, from science to politics.

What a quaint notion today, as some parents, with the support of an administration more interested in surveillance than freedom, snatch the very books that might excite a young imagination off shelves, the better to control the uncontrollable — a thirst for knowledge about people and places that don’t end at a neighborhood boundary.

My parents never put limits on what I read. If I was able to read it, I had their blessing. We would discuss complex notions and unfamiliar themes, with all of us learning things about the world and ourselves. It was so thrilling that I followed their example as best as I could with my own son, and he has a houseful of books to show for it.

This administration’s effort to silence those who would extol their wonders has hit communities and our nation’s military academies. Search the library shelves at the Naval Academy for a book that will transport you to someplace you’ve only dreamed about? Unless that book is on an approved list (Maya Angelou out, Mein Kampf in), you’d better buy your own, and fast, before publishing houses feel the wrath of Trump.

It has even hit the Library of Congress in Washington, a point of pride for the nation since it was founded in 1800. Its collection, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts, is the largest in the world.

It’s not a lending library in the usual sense but rather a resource and a repository of rare and important items in our nation’s history. It’s the main research arm of Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.

When Dr. Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th librarian of Congress in 2016, she brought a wealth of acclaim and experience to the position, including years as CEO of my beloved Enoch Pratt Free Library. Those on both sides of the aisle praised the innovation and modernization that Hayden brought to the Library of Congress and the ways she made it more accessible for all Americans.

She was fired by the Trump administration in an email in which the esteemed Hayden, a woman and an African American, was called “Carla.” The disrespect might have been the point for an administration that denigrates Black Americans of distinction.

But it will take more than petty retaliation to defeat books.

A few years ago, I brought a class I was teaching to the Library of Congress, where the teens were in awe of the beauty of the main reading room in the Thomas Jefferson Building and excited when they learned how they could obtain their own library cards.

They instinctively knew the truth of what author Percival Everett said, that “the most subversive thing any of us can do is read.” When he expressed his displeasure with book bans, I found myself nodding along with an auditorium full of fellow book nerds.

Yes, it’s still my escape. Members of my book club, Zora’s Daughters, had taken a road trip May 15 to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to hear Everett discuss his life, career and Pulitzer Prize-winning book James, with a central character inspired by but far from the enslaved “Jim” of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

No doubt it would be on Trump’s list of banned books since it depicts a Black man as a flesh-and-blood human being whose life, along with the lives of family and friends, depends on his intelligence and empathy.

“It used to be we all wanted our children to be more educated than we are,” said Everett.

I realized he was talking about people like my parents, and I felt grateful.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call "Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis" podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Spreading From Texas, A Plague Of Would-Be Book Burners

Spreading From Texas, A Plague Of Would-Be Book Burners

Not so long ago, book burnings were considered a festive group activity by assorted right-wing zealots. Today, though, burning seems so old-fashioned and, well... crude.

Yet, the concept is burning hotter than ever among a gaggle of testosterone-driven Republican leaders eager to show voters that they will go to extremes to incinerate progressive ideas and people's personal liberties. Rather than lighting bonfires, though, the new fad for GOP politicians is simply to use government power to ban the offending books (thus saving the expense of matches and lighter fluid).

It might not surprise you to learn that our Lone Star State's extremist political operatives are leading today's book-banning frenzy. One Jonathan Mitchell, for example, is going from town to town pushing Texas Republican officeholders to pass local ordinances he labels "Safe Library Patron Protection." Yes, patrons, censoring what you can read is necessary to "protect" you. The GOP ban prohibits libraries from having books, videos, etc. that contain "immoral content," which he defines as depictions of nudity, sexual behavior, mentions of masturbation, LGBTQ+ life, etc. It's also autocratically homophobic, making it illegal for librarians to display LGBTQ flags or even mention "LGBTQ Pride Month."

This repressive monomania stabs even deeper into our freedom of expression by concocting a "right" of right-wing vigilantes to enforce the ordinances. Yes, self-appointed bands of bounty hunters would be authorized to roam the countryside suing local libraries (and individual librarians) for having "banned" books on the shelves. To spur this political malice, Mitchell's scheme provides a $10,000 reward for every violation a vigilante finds (or fabricates).

Well, you say, thank God I don't live in Texas! But — Hello! — repression doesn't recognize state borders, so the pernicious idea of paid library marauders is spreading across the country. To help defend your freedom from them, go to the American Library Association: ala.org.

How Despicable Are Big Pharma's Price Gougers?

Profiteering is always bad, but there are degrees of profiteer. Level 1 includes your everyday price gougers, like banks and airlines. At Level 2, you'll find the more demonic outfits like loan sharks and for-profit college hucksters. Then, top of the heap at Level 3, you'll find Eli Lilly.

This $288 billion drug-making colossus is America's primary peddler of insulin, the diabetes drug that some seven million Americans must constantly take literally to stay alive. By having both monopoly power over the market and such a huge base of captive customers, Lilly has gleefully jacked up its prices again and again over three decades, with insulin now costing each sufferer as much as $1,000 a month! Finally, under intense political pressure to stop its extreme, life-threatening gouging, the giant recently announced it would soon cut its insulin price by a whopping 70 percent! In full-page ads, Lilly hailed its corporate generosity, magnanimously declaring that "everyone deserves affordable options."

But — Hello! — it has intentionally charged unaffordable rip-off prices for 30 years, wallowing in monopoly profits. And — Hello! again — if Lilly says it can keep profiting on its insulin product despite slashing the price by 70%, that means it has been overcharging patients by 70 percent all this time! Yet, its rich executives want us to thank them? No thank you.

Even with the price cut, they're still charging $66 for a single vial of insulin. Guess what? It costs Lilly less than $7 to produce that vial, and it could be sold profitably for under $9.

Meanwhile, note that the ballyhooed price cut is voluntary, meaning Lilly can raise the price again at any time. Indeed, David Ricks (who personally pockets $19 million a year from the profiteering) has refused to pledge that he'll keep the medicine affordable.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

The Party Of Fear Is Becoming The Party Of Losers

The Party Of Fear Is Becoming The Party Of Losers

Here’s a fun fact: Years ago, in the early 70’s as I recall, the Village Voice hired some kind of polling firm to determine what were the best-read parts of the paper. I’m sure it wasn’t done because the editors were thinking of covering more of the stuff that the most people read. If that was why they ran the survey, they would have probably quickly dropped the classical music criticism of the wonderful Leighton Kerner, the Voice’s critic in that area, who wrote of classical music as if he were conducting an orchestra of words in his head. No, I think the survey of readers was probably done at the behest of the display advertising department, who could then take the figures from the survey and adjust advertising prices based on how many people read the rock and roll or theater sections, for example.

Well, can you guess what turned out to be the best-read page in the paper? The letters to the editor column. The letters ran on page four, with Jules Feiffer’s cartoons across the bottom. There wasn’t any advertising on page four, but there was on page five, so they must have boosted the rates for the ads on the facing page. The letters page, of course, was the comments section of the era, when readers got their opportunity to vent, telling Voice authors what they thought of them, complaining that their favorite political issue, or their favorite entertainment venue, or their favorite playwright or artist or dance company wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

I realize I’ve written about this before, but I got my start as a writer in the letters to the editor column of the Voice, writing cranky, rather conservative critiques of the stories I read. My first one drew counter-criticism the following week from an array of New York intellectuals that included Dwight MacDonald, Paul Goodman, and Aryeh Neier, who at the time headed up the New York office of the ACLU and went on to become a founder of Human Rights Watch. Each of them gave the upstart cadet from West Point a good political spanking, which I replied to the following week in the letters column, of course.

People turned to the letters column in the Voice first, it seemed to me, because that was where the action was – writers complaining about other writers, pissed-off old lefties lecturing new lefties who they found ignorant about the origins of this, that, or the other thing…you get the picture. The letter writers were uniformly smart, informed, and some were quite funny as they took on the established writers in the Voice.

You may recognize in the ferment of the Voice letters column a familiar ferment in our own comments section of my Substack newsletter. Although I don’t often reach into the comments and post replies, I read them with great interest. When I was on the staff of the Voice, I made it my policy not to reply to letters to the editor that criticized my pieces. I figured that I had the privilege of being in the Voice as a staff writer, and my pieces spoke for themselves. The letters column was for readers, not Village Voice writers. By and large, I treat the comments section the same way.

But for the first time the other day I posted a column opening a thread for readers, inviting them to comment generally about what was on their minds, and I also invited them to suggest areas they thought would deserve my attention. To put it mildly, I was stunned by the response. I jumped in and left replies here and there as I filled a couple of pages of a reporter’s notebook sitting next to me with a long list of suggestions for stories. Some just aren’t in my wheelhouse, as they say, and would be fine for another columnist to write about. Others, such as the one in the title of this piece, fit me like a well-made suit.

Ralph T. suggested that I consider writing about “the layers and layers of fears driving a majority of Republican voters.” Helpfully, he provided a list, which I will quote from selectively here:

Afraid of vaccines.

Afraid of voters.

Afraid of drop boxes.

So afraid of Democrats that they’re willing to believe they’re killing abducted babies in the basements of pizza joints.

Afraid to go out in public without an arsenal strapped to their flak jackets.

Afraid of LGBTQ folks.

Afraid of Black folks.

Afraid of Latin folks, especially the ones across our southern border who we desperately need in our workforce.

Terrified of Jewish folks.

Afraid of immigrants, although that’s what 98% of us are, having pretty much killed off the local natives when we got here.

Afraid of women, especially smart women.

Afraid of respectfully facing our past.

Afraid of the future.

Afraid of change.

Afraid of books, which I suppose comes from being afraid of reading, or simply not being able to read.

Ralph T. went on to list more fears many Republicans share, but that one stopped me in my tracks, and not because I’ve written books, write a column, and for more than 50 years have depended on readers in order to make a living.

Have you been in a house that has no books? No magazines, no reading material of any kind, with the possible exception of a cookbook or two? I have.

I’ve been in houses of people who were poor, perhaps too poor to afford books and magazines, but I’ve also been in houses of middle-class people who just did not read. Out in L.A., I was even in a beach house in Malibu owned by a very wealthy person in the movie business that contained no books at all. There were some very nice, and very expensive, pieces of art on the wall, but no books, not a one, not even a cookbook, and the owner was not a Republican. People in the movie business like the person from Malibu had what they called “readers,” assistants whose job it was to read books and screenplays that were being considered to be bought to make movies. I didn’t understand why these executives wouldn’t, or couldn’t, read the material they spent so much money on until I realized it was the prospect of failure that made them afraid. They needed to be told what they were supposed to have read was “hot,” that other executives in the business were after the same property so they could contend with their fear that they would spend all that money and the project would end up as a failure.

What all of the people who lived in those houses shared, including the person from Malibu, was fear. They were afraid of different things. In the deep South, I found people afraid of the future, of change, of outsiders, of people of other races and creeds, people who were simply unlike themselves. The phrase “ignorance is bliss” comes to mind, but not as a truism. Ignorance on that level is anything but blissful, bringing with it a closed off-ness that causes such a vacuum of knowledge and surrounding darkness that it’s impossible to deal with on any level whatsoever. To be without accurate and learned information is to be alone with yourself – alone with your fears, as it were.

When I lived in the deep South, I once asked a man who was overtly, openly racist why he was that way. I probed, and not very gently. Did something happen to him as he was growing up? Had he been mugged or beaten up by a Black person or Black people? Did he even know anyone who was Black in a way beyond thanking a server in a restaurant for a refill of his coffee? The answer to every one of my questions was no. It was revealed that there was no reason behind his racism. It just was. He had been raised in what you would call a culture of racism, and so it infected him in the way a virus gets into you. It was in the air he breathed. It was all around him in the lives of his friends and family members and the people he worked with and hunted with and spent holidays with. They were racist, so he was racist. There was a kind of comfort in their community of racism and the fears they shared. The rest of them were afraid to breach the barrier they had built around themselves, and so was he.

Their fears encompassed other things on Ralph T.’s excellent list. Another person in the deep South I spoke to came right out and told me he thought Black people should not have the right to vote. He was afraid of their votes, because they weren’t his votes or the votes of his white friends and neighbors. It didn’t take but a moment or two to see that he was afraid not just of Black people themselves, and Black people voting, but of living in a world in which he felt surrounded by things he did not understand, people he didn’t trust, ideas he was afraid of because to start with, he was unfamiliar with them. He didn’t want to acknowledge the legacy of slavery that was all around him where he lived in the South – the Black side of town had unpaved streets, no sidewalks, no streetlights, shack-like houses – hell, the town didn’t even run its sewage system into the Black section.

The only public thing the Black people in his town had, really, was the right to attend the public schools, and that right, in his opinion, was forced on the town and its people, its white people, by a Supreme Court and a Congress that he felt did not represent people like him, people whom the laws and the culture and the rest of the nation, in fact, had left behind. He was afraid of people who were unlike him; their ideas were unlike his, and crucially, there was nothing he could do about it, at least in part because Black people could vote.

Republicans have come up with a new catchphrase to appeal to voters like this man, and to the people in whose houses I had been who did not have books. Critical race theory. They didn’t even have to define it, to tell anyone what it meant. It didn’t need a meaning, because everyone it was intended to appeal to knew exactly what it meant. The phrase, critical race theory, has a meaning as an academic discipline, but that’s not the way Republicans are using it. In a political sense, from the politicians who conceived of the phrase as a scare tactic, they’re saying we are on your side. We acknowledge your fears. In fact, your fears are our fears, so vote for us, and we will do whatever we can to assuage them. We will put Black people, and liberals, and everyone else you’re scared of in their place.

It's beyond us against them. It’s beyond playing on their fears. It’s taking fear and turning it into a weapon.

Armies use fear as a weapon on the battlefield in wars. That’s what artillery and rockets are all about – suddenly, without warning, out of the sky comes something that will blow you up and kill you. But it didn’t work when the Germans rained down bombs and V-1 rockets on London during World War II, and it’s not working as the Russians do everything in their power to break the will of the Ukrainian people with rockets and drones and artillery shells.

Fear in politics is beginning to exhibit its shortcomings as well. “Owning the libs” was fun for Republicans while it was being driven by Donald Trump and his machinery of hate and fear, but he lost. The Republican Party, which was supposed to sweep the midterms in a red wave, even while they will control the House of Representatives with a very slim majority, is wounded.

Sure, fear works as political weapon for Republicans and they’re not going to let go of it any time soon. But the thing about fear is that it’s not fun to be afraid all the time. That’s why horror movies work: you watch them and you can be afraid for a time, but you know that the movie is going to end, and you won’t have to be afraid anymore.

The kinds of fears Ralph T. was good enough to list for us are not fun. They’re stultifying, they’re dark, and there is no way out of them except embracing at least a few of the things you’re afraid of, like reading and seeking knowledge and allowing yourself to look at what is around you with open eyes and a least a tiny crack in your closed heart.

So fear not. A corner is beginning to be turned. Donald Trump, if he is the nominee of the Republican Party in 2024, will lose again. Republicans, unless they find a way to appeal to folks who are not congenitally fearful, will see their power as a political party wane.

There is, in fact, an end result of the fears we have discussed here at the behest of our friend, Ralph T. It’s called losing.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this column is reprinted with permission.

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