If Trump Does It – It Must Be Dastardly

Monday, September 1, 2025

At least that seems to be the case in certain newsrooms (do they still exist?) these days.  I keep seeing stories about perfectly normal actions by this administration written as if said actions were so nefarious, so awful, that they threatened not merely democracy, but life on earth itself.  The latest example is from the New York Times, in which the Trump administration has appointed a lawyer that was once suing EPA to prevent an adoption of a specific rule to the EPA to oversee the reversal of said rule.  Like that does not happen everyday.  Democratic administration routinely appoint activists that have lobbied for an action for years to actually execute that action.  But somehow this conservative move is a “conflict of interest?”

Far more interesting to me is the rule itself – concerning a class of chemicals known as PFAS.  Two things are known about PFAS.  1) it is persistent.  That means it does not readily or naturally degrade so once released to the environment it tends to stay there.  2) It is suspected, key word there – suspected, carcinogen.  These two facts have gotten the entire regulatory apparatus licking its chops seeking to seize control of well, almost everything, since PFAS are ubiquitous in the environment.  We have not proven they are dangerous.  If they are, we do not know how much so, at what levels, and by what pathway.  We just know the EPA needs something to do.  Well, that and if the Trump administration opposes it – it must be right.

Wasn’t it the fear of something not nearly as harmful as suspected that lead us down the rosy path to shuttering the world – you know covid?  Facts and suspicions are different things.  But then the way we educate children anymore, who can tell.  A great piece this morning in The Free Press about how bad education has gotten in this country.  Writer Dan Lerman describes it as a “war on knowledge.”

Ask any cognitive scientist and they’ll tell you that factual knowledge is the foundation of thinking. Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, put it simply in his modern classic Why Don’t Students Like School?: “Thinking well requires knowing facts. . . . The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes like reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge.”

Our brains are magical marvels of daydreaming and contemplation. We piece ideas together. We pepper and salt. We ponder. And out of this pondering comes . . . virtually everything. Companies. Screenplays. My hilarious Rage Against the Machine joke from earlier.

And what happens when we empty the well? When the reservoir is dry, we see a cacophonous litany of disparate voices, each talking about their feelings and perspectives, with no respect for factual relevance. Yap, yap, yap.

It seem “yap, yap, yap” passes for smart these days.  We react, fear, and presume when we should study and think.  For example, we have spent decades, since the 1980’s, trying to “heal the ozone layer.”  Efforts involved international conferences, major, and expensive, studies funded by taxpayers, regulation, fines, penalties and an entire shift in the consumer market away from aerosols only to recently find – “Healing Ozone Layer Could Trigger 40% More Global Warming.”  Perhaps, as with covid, we were a bit hasty on that one.  But we found this “hole” in the ozone and we got scared so we acted when we should have sought more knowledge.

And it only gets worse when we try to play god.  “Scientists Say They May Have Just Figured Out the Origin of Life.”  Oh Dear Lord!  Talk about your grandiose overextension of a claim.  What they found was:

“We have achieved the first part of that complex process, using very simple chemistry in water at neutral pH to link amino acids to RNA,” said study coauthor Matthew Powner, a chemist at University College London, in a statement about the work. “The chemistry is spontaneous, selective, and could have occurred on early Earth.”

Where did the amino acids come from?  And the RNA?  And what, precisely are the odds of those reactions producing actual useful proteins as opposed to gunk?  Here we are not motivated to ignore facts by fear, but by an immeasurable sense of our own divinity.  Facts do not matter because we’re just that smart.  Like the idiot that thought pick-ups based on a V-6 would sell just as well as the V-8 version.

Objectivity has to be taught.  How to observe a thing and see what it is doing instead of what we wish it were doing, is a learned skill.  As is knowing the limits of our knowledge – what you cannot conclude from a circumstance.  And it seems, if Lerman is right, that we are no longer teaching those skills.  And so, covid, runaway regulation of so-called “ozone-depleters,” and the attempted upending of everything chasing down PFAS become the result.  We have, apparently, replaced reason with “an abundance of caution.”  Much to our chagrin.

The appointment of Scott Cook at EPA is not a “conflict of interest;” it is an injection of reason in an agency, supposedly based in science, that is not the least bit afraid to manipulate an emotion-driven public to accumulate power.