Do Orange Man Bad better

You've got to know when to hold 'em

I seem to have gained 400 new subscribers in the last 24 hours, which is nice, but I fear that I’m about to lose them all again as fast. It was all caused by a nice Note from

Health Nerd

, setting me up as a voice of reason in a world dominated by Trump and anti-science. But judging from the bios of a lot of the recent new arrivals, I don’t think they’re going to see me that way. This isn’t a Resistance account, whatever that means.

That’s not to say that I support Trump. I absolutely don’t. It’s just that I find myself permanently frustrated by the ways that some people choose to oppose him - be honest, it’s not exactly working well so far.

I will explain what I mean, with reference to the infographic below, posted by my old COVID sparring partner

Diving into Data & Decision making

. But for most of the 400 new arrivals, I think you’re in the wrong place. Unsubscribe from me, go follow Christina instead.

My problem with the graphic is that it’s just a list, without any attempt to prioritise within it. Worse, some perfectly reasonable people will even agree with some of the things on it, so presenting it all together on a level basis can even risk weakening the case against the bad things there.

Take PEPFAR. You can read a much longer account of this on

Benjamin Ryan

’s Substack, but in brief, this is a programme which (among things) tackles HIV and AIDS in Africa. As he writes:

Within a few weeks of a treatment interruption, HIV rebounds and becomes transmissible—raising the risk of transmission within communities and from mother to child. If the 680,000 HIV-positive pregnant women cared for by PEPFAR cannot remain on antiretrovirals, amfAR estimates that within 90 days, 136,000 of their babies will be born with the lifelong infection.

It’s hard to think of a more cartoonish manifestation of evil than a demi-trillionaire wandering into long-standing aid programmes with an axe, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of babies will be born with HIV, just because he wants to impress people like Catturd on Twitter.

But if you want to attack the decision, I think you have to do it right. It’s pointless to pretend that there wasn’t waste somewhere in the aid system. The argument to be making is that this specific programme was started by notorious leftist George W Bush, on grounds of Christian charity. It makes no sense for a Government which relies on a religious base to be dismantling something which is a case study of how useful altruism can come from the right (see

Ian Leslie

for a longer account here).

Any half-decent opposition movement should be attacking directly on this stuff. But instead we get an infographic which can risk presenting it as somehow equivalent to “Withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council and defunding UNRWA”. Perhaps that does sound bad. Who could be opposed to the UN Human Rights Council after all?

The problem is that labels don’t always mean what they say: just think of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. As recently as 2023, under the Biden administration, the US boycotted a session of the Human Rights Council because it was due to be chaired by Iran soon after crackdowns on women’s rights there. The US representative called this meeting an “affront to the collective conscience of the global community” and “an insult to our shared ideals”. In my view, you don’t have to be J.D. Vance to wonder whether this is a forum that’s more about anti-Western messages than protecting human rights. Do we really want to die on the hill of defending it?

Similarly on UNRWA, it’s worth remembering that countries including Germany, Japan, Austria, Italy suspended funding in early 2024, over allegations that some of its staff participated in the 7th October massacres (albeit many of them have now restored the funding). There are long-standing and troubling question marks over links between UNRWA and Hamas - this is the New York Times of December 2024 for example, not Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Like I say, I think we have to pick our battles, and decide which of Trump’s moves are worth highlighting and fighting properly. Take Ukraine. I won’t add to the trillions of pixels that have been used already to point out what a catastrophic decision it is to throw the nation under the bus and make nice with Putin.

But equally, as Europeans we can’t say we weren’t warned. It’s coming up on three years since the February 2022 invasion, and nearly as long since the horrors revealed at Bucha removed any last lingering doubt as to the nature of Russia’s plans, even for the most optimistic person. At no point since that time has Trump been anything other than the presumptive Republican nominee, nor has he ever been anything other than clear on his views on Ukraine.

Just as the Democrats could have used the time to get a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Europe could have spent the last three years taking defence and energy security seriously, instead of undershooting NATO defence spending targets and importing 15% of its gas from Russia as late as 2023.

So yes, Orange Man bad. But it’s not all on him. And in the meantime, we might have to spend a lot more time, money and energy seriously worrying about this stuff rather than asking whether it was justified that Elon Musk attacked Wikipedia. And that’s another good example. Sure, for a certain mindset, Wikipedia might feel like an unimpeachable and unbiased source. But again, in my view there are quite well-founded worries about how activists have learned to exploit the platform.

As one tiny example, take the Wikipedia page for Long COVID, which upfront in its key facts box gives a figure of “50–70% of hospitalised COVID-19 cases, 10–30% of non-hospitalised cases, and 10–12% of vaccinated cases” leading to the condition. It’s fair to say that these are not exactly unimpeachable and well-accepted numbers. I dived into the papers used as sources for those statistics a little while back, but suffice it to say they all date from the pre-omicron era and may not have statistically representative samples. As I wrote a year ago and on many other occasions, the likely true figures for current risk are much much lower.

Overall then, I think that if we want to oppose Trump, we have to be serious about the way we do it. We need to focus tightly on a narrow range of his most administration’s egregious actions and views, not try to broaden the debate into some kind of omnicause. In May last year, I was warning about the dangers of blurring science and activism, and my views really haven’t changed on that. So like I say, thanks to new subscribers for being here, but you might discover you are in the wrong place.