Again you are not making the connection, or maybe not seeing my basic point. Even if someone dislikes leftist-coded things, and this causes them both to oppose wokism and to oppose foreign aid, this still does not make opposition to foreign aid about anti-wokism. The original post suggested there was a causal arrow running between foreign aid and wokism, not that both have a causal arrow coming from the same source.

EA is an offshoot of the rationalist movement! The whole point of EA's existence is to try to have better conversations, not to accept that most conversations suck and speak in vibes!

I also don't think it's true that conservatives don't draw the distinction between foreign aid and USAID. Spend five minutes listening to any conservative talk about the decision to shut down USAID. They're not talking about foreign aid being bad in general. They are talking about things USAID has done that do not look like what people expect foreign aid to look like. They seem to enjoy harking on the claim that USAID was buying condoms for Gaza. Now, whether or not that claim is true, and whether or not you think it is good to give Gazans condoms, you have to admit that condoms are not what anybody thinks of when they think of foreign aid.

You missed my point. I agree that foreign aid is charged along partisian lines. My point was that most things that are charged along partisian lines are not charged along woke/anti-woke lines. Foreign aid is not an exception to that rule, USAID is..

I appreciate that you have a pretty nuanced view here. Much of it I agree with, some of it I do not, but I don't want to get into these weeds. I'm not sure how any of it undermines the point that wokism and opposition to foreign aid are basically orthogonal.

I don't think foreign aid is at risk of being viewed as woke. Even the conservative criticisms of USAID tend to focus on things that look very ideological and very not like traditional foreign aid. And fundamentally opposition to wokism is motivated by wanting to treat all people equally regardless of race or sex, which fits very well with EA ideas generally and with work on global health and development specifically. 

That said, it is true that for contingent historical reasons, ideas that have little to do with each other, or may even be in tension, often end up being supported by the same political party. And at our current moment in history, anti-wokism and nationalism do seem to have ended up in the same political party. I'm just saying it is the nationalism, not the anti-wokism, that is the potential issue for global health and development work.

I also don't see how wokeness would have much to do with animal advocacy. I have found EA animal advocacy people to generally be more woke than other EAs, but that is not because of their ideas about animals, it is because of other aspects of how they conduct themselves. I don't know if that generalizes to non-EA animal advocates. The concern about oligarchy pushing against animal welfare I think is a justified one, all I'm saying is wokeness doesn't really factor into that dynamic at all.

I guess I'd be somewhat interested to know why serious harassment is so unlikely. The sources that I cited seemed to be quite worrying to me on this front. 

The Guardian reported the following: “Trump’s escalating threats to pervert the criminal justice system need to be taken seriously,” said the former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich. “We have never had a presidential candidate state as one of his central goals mobilizing the levers of justice to punish enemies and reward friends. No one has ever been brazen enough to campaign on an agenda of retribution and retaliation.” And NPR reported that "Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute, imprison or otherwise punish his perceived opponents". 

I think a lot of where we differ is in how much we trust the media when it comes to Trump. I've generally found that media will report ordinary things as though they were extraordinary and bad, will take the worst possible interpretation of ambiguous quotes, and do whatever else they think will keep people irrationally afraid of Trump. Take the particular claim that you made your centerpeice - that Musk was throwing around his wealth to support Trump's nominees. "Rich American uses wealth to influence politicians" is not exactly news - that happens every day on both sides of the aisle. And what you put in block quotes was just that fact wrapped in hyperbolic language. I looked very briefly at your seven sources. All were during the election and all seemed to draw on the same quote: "Trump said that if 'radical left lunatics' disrupt the election, 'it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.'" The author somehow read that as "Trump has expressed support for using government force against domestic political rivals." Talk about a straw man! Trump was suggesting using the military to ensure the election happens. That may be unwise and unprecedented and predictably totally unnecessary, but it is nothing like using the military against political rivals. This is the press's standard MO when reporting on Trump. So when they say "100 threats to whatever" I just assume that few if any of the things on their list are actually what they are claimed to be.

Having said that, the point I was making relied less on whether Trump would actually seriously harass people, but rather whether they would fear that Trump would do so, and specifically fear this enough that they would avoid taking actions which might act as a check/balance on presidential power. Do you believe that people don't have this fear?

I agree that people have that fear. I do not think it is warranted. And I think indulging an unwarranted fear is generally a bad idea - you just incentivize people to have unwarranted fears in the future. We need political rhetoric to cool down right now, not heat up.

For your bulleted list of bad things, I agree that many of them are unqualifiedly bad. A few of them I have more nuanced views on. But I don't want to go point by point through it, as I don't think that would shed any light on whether democracy is at risk or what we should do about it.

With regard to IGs and OGE, I'm not too familiar with these institutions, but my read is that the practical implications of who holds these posts are basically nil. IGs don't directly remedy anything, they just write reports. They weren't going to accomplish anything Trump's appointees didn't want them to accomplish anyway.

I get worried when I see people questioning whether the president has the right to fire them, because I value democracy in the literal sense - accountability to the people - and the mechanism by which any executive branch employee is accountable to the people in our system is through the president's ability to fire them.

As for the neglectedness of lawsuits, I think we need to ask about particular lawsuits. It is certainly true that some lawsuits can fail for lack of money or talent. I don't know of a reason to think that either is in short supply when it comes to challenging Trump. As you've pointed out, people are scared as shit, and there are plenty of liberals in the legal profession. But if we want to make the neglectedness case, I want to see it at the level of a particular legal issue, not just "trump is bad for [checks and balances and good government]".

That seems reasonable up to a certain point. It seems reasonable for long-term grants to be paid out on some schedule and for a researcher to arrange a study such that a loss of funding would force them to wrap up early and without the data they were hoping for. But I think a researcher should still have an obligation to have enough money in their own bank account that, if funding gets cut, they can wrap up the study in a way that is safe for the subjects - they should have enough cash to ween the subjects off drugs or remove devices early or whatever else is involved in wrapping up. Funding getting cut is a risk that I would think would be fairly obvious when planning a study - especially if your source of funding is a government agency in a country that you know will have an election before the study concludes.

I'm not sold, and I'm going to lay out some general reasons.

Firstly, a lot of the concerns expressed here I think are extremely unlikely. I do not think there is any serious risk that Trump will send the military after, or otherwise seriously harass, former government employees. I do not think he will pursue a third term or otherwise interfere with our tradition of free and fair elections. And I do not think he will openly defy a court order.

Some of the other things you fear I don't necessarily see as bad. As a matter of democratic accountability, by which I mean accountability to the people rather than checks and balances or "good" governance, I do think the president has the right to fire executive branch employees, whether or not we like the particular decisions he makes.

Secondly, and my error bars on this point do cross the zero line, but my expectation is that Trump will reduce the risk of a nuclear or biological catastrophe. The wars in Ukraine and Israel both started on Biden's watch. With Trump I am hopeful that both will reach some kind of resolution on somewhat favorable terms.

I do think it is good that people are filing lawsuits challenging the questionably legal things Trump is doing. I don't think that this intervention is particularly neglected.

Also, you seem to suggest that Danielle Sassoon's actions in regard to the Eric Adams case are somehow an instance of legislative checks on the executive. I don't get that. Sassoon was an employee of the executive branch, not the legislative. That's why an executive branch official was able to fire her.

I'm confused. The wording of the headline suggests that USAID is not conducting trials in-house, they are giving grants to other organizations that conduct trials. If that's the case, the only way this makes sense is if the researchers went ahead and started treating patients before the government's check hit their bank accounts - that the researchers started the experiment without having enough money already in their own bank accounts to safely wrap up their work with their already enrolled subjects. That can't be ethical, can it? For precisely this reason? Shouldn't the headline be grossly unethical conduct by government-funded researchers?