US President Donald Trump said Thursday he is open to extending the April 5 deadline for TikTok’s sale in the country if necessary. Speaking at the White House, Trump noted “a lot of interest” in the deal but stated that an extension is not currently required. “We have a lot of interest in TikTok. And China is going to play a role, so hopefully China will approve of the deal, but they are going to play a role,” he said, without specifying potential buyers. A bipartisan law had initially set a Jan. 19 deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US operations, but Trump granted a 75-day extension, running until April 5. He has also expressed support for brokering a sale and suggested the US government should receive a 50% stake in the video-sharing platform. It remains unclear if further extensions are legally possible. [Bloomberg]
By Paul Gordon Collier, Editor
Originally published April 25, 2025 for our End-of-Month Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get semi-monthly issues.
“‘Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’ They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.’” –Psalm 82:3-7
“Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both? … Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased to adequately meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created… In both political and scientific development, the sense of malfunction that can lead to crisis is prerequisite to revolution.”
–Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
A news item written up in scienceblog.com titled “Conservative Americans Consistently Distrust Science” serves as an example of agit prop worth considering for its effectiveness. This type of agit prop could easily be called “the banality of evil” agit prop.
If you examine the site, you will find no headline screams that this is an overt agit prop site. The articles posted are attributed to various universities. This one is attributed to the University of Amsterdam.
Outside of one article assuming “Climate Change” (man-made climate change that will existentially alter the planet) is an established fact, the other articles are agit prop neutral.
You have to read past the headline and the anon author credit, “Amsterdam University,” to figure out where the subterfuge in this article begins.
If you actually read the article, you will realize the agit prop began with the source of the article itself, the University of Amsterdam, the institution that conducted the “study” showing American conservatives are growing more and more skeptical of science. They are becoming near-lost science-skeptics.
Bastiaan Rutjens, one of the researchers, said, “In America, but also in other countries, conservatives generally have lower trust in science. Since the 1980s, trust of science among conservatives in America has even been plummeting.”
The anon behind the words wrote, “While past research has documented conservative skepticism toward science that conflicts with political or religious beliefs – such as climate change or evolution – this new study reveals that the trust gap extends far beyond ideologically charged topics.”
The conservative is doubting science itself, no matter what the science is addressing. This is what the anon behind the words would have you believe. Yet, the “science” is never defined. Is it the scientific institutions? Is it the scientific method?
The closest they get to recognizing the difference between institution and method is when they quote that same researcher, Rutjens, who said, “Science is also increasingly dismissed in some circles as a ‘leftist hobby,’ and universities as strongholds of the leftist establishment.”
Outside of that, they continue to simply use the word science as the thing conservatives are rejecting, accusing them of suffering increasingly from “science skepticism.”
“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought, for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” –Hanna Arendt
Hanna Arendt addressed “the banality of evil” through the person of Adolf Eichmann, who was on a train to Jerusalem, where he would be held accountable for his crimes. She noted that he was not a cartoon villain; he looked perfectly banal.
He was the paradigmatic representative of this “banality of evil,” a man who presupposed the world through a lens of “evil” where logic and reason, and even the scientific method, can serve the Reich, where truth dies unless it can calculate missile trajectories.
This, I think, is a spirit that also captures this study’s “findings.” It also describes the underlying spirit, the banality of evil, behind the method this article utilizes to spread a dangerous lie, that conservatives are afraid of truth.
We must reach them with our truth (if we can, and we might not be able to). Science is truth.
The sales pitch, that conservatives are near-allergic to truth in a near-un-restorative way, is not expressed so directly as to obviously appear evil. To assume a whole group of people who fit into a certain belief system are nearly unredeemable is one thing; to also portray them as being a significant barrier to saving the planet would OBVIOUSLY be an evil, dangerous thought. They are unredeemable obstacles to our “salvation.”
But this message is delivered in a “neutral” language game, “the study” language game, that relies on the audience assuming this is truly “science,” determining a whole people are a threat to the planet by merely continuing to exist.
It’s almost as if “the science” allows these partisan militants to cloak their evil in BANALITY, something “the science” has been able to do throughout human history, including justifying slavery and the Holocaust.
Let’s walk this out a little more to make our point…
What does one do when one has a whole class of people who seem to be practically INCAPABLE of facing real truth? What does one do when one has a whole class of TRUTH DENIERS when the world is in danger of being KILLED?!
One hopes you can read where this line of reasoning leads, it leads to the logical and reasonable and even science-based assumption that “something must be done” to rid us of this “conservative problem.”
At least with Cain, the first authoritarian, he openly murdered Abel. He was only shamed by fear of being killed, not the remorse of murdering his brother. These Cains cast their dirty work on others, the tender minds who will eventually get this “study” delivered to them by charismatic “thought leaders” on social media, like Destiny and Hasan Piker (more on that later).
It will go something like this; In the perfectly innocent interest of saving the planet, “scientists” might one day help the world solve the “conservative problem.” Perhaps it will be a Solution that will end all other solutions for good. It seems like a perfectly banal conclusion to matter-of-factly make, come what may.
As Rutjens laments the severity of the problem (of reaching conservatives with “science,” aka “truth”), he remains “hopeful.” He declares, “This does not mean it is impossible, but these short interventions do not work to make science more transparent and reliable for certain groups. We need stronger interventions that make science truly personal. What can science contribute to your life, here and now?”
If this doesn’t tell you that Rutjens is an evangelical scientist, nothing else will. He practically sounds like a Pastor trying to rally his youth pastors to “GET OUT THERE AND PREACH THE SCIENCE!”
But what do you do when your god tells you things need to change to save the planet (and hopefully also humanity), but certain humans won’t go along with the plan, no matter how HARD you “reason” with them? You send out a signal to begin those “stronger interventions.”
This site serves as an academic “signal” to the DNC-allied media to feature stories highlighting conservatives rejecting “science” as a means of further demonizing the non-DNC person, the “other.”
Then, they can keep quoting this scientific study that determined that this fact, that conservatives seem almost biologically allergic to truth, is, in fact, a fact.
It will also be grist for the mill of DNC online Molotov cocktail throwers like Destiny and Hasan Piker, who will cite this “study” as “proof” “conservatives” (anyone not them) hate truth, and there’s LITTLE that can be done about it. WE MUST HAVE A VIOLENT SOLUTION! (And both of them are already doing this anyway).
The intent of the signal is to keep the assault on the non-left going as a means of disrupting and discouraging, as a means of CONTROL. The heart of the problem this piece is addressing is control, or the lack thereof.
They somewhat give up the game when the anon behind the words writes, “The persistence of this distrust poses significant challenges for addressing major societal problems that require scientific solutions, such as pandemics and climate change. When people distrust scientists, they’re less likely to accept scientific recommendations or support policies based on scientific evidence.”
“Major societal problems” that “REQUIRE” nothing else but “scientific solutions” make science seem like something nothing short of a god, especially when you consider this same “science” is now trying to deny basic human biology, that males are men and females are women and the outliers do not justify adding new categories to those terms (or detaching “gender” from “sexuality”).
“Science” is always the people and institutions that fund the “science,” the people that select the researchers that get funded, the people that pass the future researchers (the college professors), and finally and lastly, the researchers themselves.
This is how “science” is gatekept. These gatekeepers ensure only orthodox thinkers with preferred identities get through, get funded, and get tenured.
Under the current “science” regime, this gatekeeping has gotten even more intolerant of true “diversity,” diversity of thought, ESPECIALLY “conservative” thought (like a man is a male, which is apparently now a “conservative” belief).
The gatekeepers allow an increasingly narrower range of acceptable beliefs among its researchers. The questions one can even ask are less and less, and the questions getting funded are mostly intended to produce the orthodox narrative’s preferred result(s).
Perhaps if you asked conservatives simply if they believe in the scientific method, you might get a better response. This writer assumes the leftist would be more inclined to trust “the science” than they would to trust the “scientific method.” The reverse is most likely true if you ask the conservative the same two questions.
Perhaps if you asked conservatives if they believe science can be our source for determining the “oughtness” in our lives, the source of value, ethics, morality, you might also learn of the source in the increasing “skepticism” in “science,” its continued and increasing claims it can be such a source, THE SOURCE for human value itself.
You will find the left is far more inclined to believe this logical impossibility than “conservatives” are (or really anyone not leftist).
As “science” increasingly excludes non-leftist thought in its institutions and continues to allow these institutions to become more about narrative than fact (“lived experience” than hard data), anyone willing to face REAL TRUTH will become increasingly skeptical of “science.”
“Almost always, the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously, these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.” –Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The new people that were ushered in, partly through DEI and other identity-filtering selection systems, have been devising ways to ensure they shut the door behind them so that what they did to the old white cis men that came before them doesn’t happen to them as well.
As these “conservatives” continue to see this happening before their very eyes, this writer believes these “conservatives” will only INCREASE their rejection of “science as god,” and their god, like men, will also die.
“… a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” -Max Planck, from his Scientific Autobiography.
Soon, the paradigm the “science” is now locked in, the paradigm of standpoint epistemology (“lived truth” valued according to the race, gender, sex, and belief of the individual, not the merits of their claims), will be pushed aside by whatever bursts through to replace it.
The “new generation” has already slipped into “old generation” status. The coup is already afoot.
Let us hope their replacements are not activists, like them, but scientists, true courageous pursuers of “truth” grounded in the understanding of the limitations of knowing and the limits of science to presume it could justify organizing humans according to whatever universal “good” it might claim it can scientifically “discover.”
On the surface, this is a reasonable article. It even offers SOME HOPE to the reasonable world that SOME of the conservatives MIGHT be saved from their own ignorance, if they just figure out how to show these truth-allergic conservatives how SCIENCE HELPS THEIR LIVES.
Conservatives clearly don’t know science delivered them their iPhones, clearly.
Underneath, Rutjens gives it a human face, but one protected by the label “researcher,” just a “neutral observer” reporting the facts and drawing logical conclusions. Rutjens is just a banal man reporting banal facts, really…
The heavy lifting, though, is done by anon behind the words, whose very title choice alone will reinforce in those who already hate the non-left that sub-humanizing these “others” more is not only ok, but it’s also morally essential to do so. After all, they simply can’t be reached.
If they read it, it will be worse. If they have the intelligence to remember particular facts, like the name of the researcher and the university, it will be like a bomb thrown into a theater full of already-raging leftists (the types of bombs agitators like Destiny and Hasan Piker regularly throw into their own livestreaming audiences).
However, an agit prop bomb like this, veiled in banality and goodwill, is absorbed in the bodies of the audience members, only to be released later, in some way, when they come upon “the other,” the “conservative,” and they have a chance to hurt them.
It would be morally wrong not to punish the blasphemer of the holy god, “the science,” after all.