It’s now clear that one of the only things the Trump administration can be counted on to do is nominate completely unqualified individuals with scandalous, racist, and/or just plain dumb pasts for top positions--and then watch helplessly as journalists gleefully unearth the receipts.
From Scott Pruitt’s seriously troublesome emails with Oklahoma industry to DOE nominee William Bradford’s tweets calling President Obama a “Kenyan creampuff,” it’s nice to know we can count on the Internet to provide regular peeks into the unhinged histories of who’s running our government.
Now, Sam Clovis, Trump’s nominee for the USDA’s top science spot, is up to bat. Clovis’s resume, with its lack of basic scientific credentials, has already been thoroughly dissected in multiple outlets (ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman has done particularly excellent work here). But the disastrous job interview isn’t over. Last week, CNN dug up some old blog posts Clovis wrote as a right-wing radio host back in 2011 and 2012. Most of the posts are unhinged diatribes on Hannity-type conspiracy theories: Barack Obama’s Muslim heritage, how the US government targets pro-life activists, and other Fox News-encouraged fairytales that have now become a mainstay of our news cycle.
Clovis also used his blog to rant on the history of racial politics in the United States in a bizarre handful of posts. One screed calls on the 2012 Republican presidential candidates to publicly label progressives as “liars, race traders and race 'traitors.” (Regular readers of the DR know our fondness for puns, so allow us to nominate “race trader” as both the most egregiously racist and the most confusing wordplay we’ve seen in a long while.) In another, Clovis declares that then-President Obama has “no experience at anything other than race baiting and race trading as a community organizer.” In a third post, Clovis calls civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois “the first race-trader,” accusing Du Bois of encouraging black Americans to vote for segregationist Woodrow Wilson.
Calling out Clovis’s loony views here is in no way an attempt to paint the Democratic party in a positive light--progressives certainly have a troubled history of abusing the black community for political power. Wilson was, of course, a big ol’ racist, and passed policies during his administration that seriously harmed the fates of black Americans for decades to come. But placing the historical onus for systematic oppression on a black history icon is quintessentially racist, and ignores the basic fact that Wilson eventually lost Du Bois’s support over his segregationist policies. And Clovis’s accusation that the first black president exploited race relations for political gain is an all-too-familiar form of racism among the right. (It might, you know, help to have some sort of training in historical analysis before tackling these types of issues...but, as Clovis’s nomination to USDA shows, you can basically provide expertise in any academic field you want as long as you have some sort of Ph.D.)
It’s important to place Clovis’s lack of scientific experience and his climate denial in the context of his worrisome and wacky understanding of the history of race. As Mariel Garza at the LA Times points out in an essay posted last week, Clovis’s off-the-wall posts strengthen questions about his readiness for the USDA position. “It’s troubling to think of someone without a background in evidence-based scientific study making important policy decisions for a governmental agency responsible for the nation’s food safety, nutrition, agricultural and natural resources,” Garza writes. “Compounding the résumé gap is that, as his blog posts reveal, Clovis seems to embrace tired conservative tropes without question. Will he be open to scientific study that doesn’t support his ideology?”
While these blog posts don’t deal directly with science, they add worrisome depth to Clovis’s absolute unfitness for the USDA position by showing his willingness to swallow right-wing nonsense wholesale. What’s more, in an age when intersectionality is becoming increasingly important to scientific policy, Clovis represents a step in the entirely wrong direction. A fourth Clovis post attributing “culture” differences as to why recovery after natural disasters in the Midwest were more successful than the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is, perhaps, the most subtly troubling of the lot. Having a racist like Clovis in charge of scientific policy isn’t just insensitive: his attitudes could do real damage to communities around the country.
Incredibly, after the posts became public, a USDA spokesperson defended Clovis. “All of his reporting either on the air or in writing over the course of his career has been based on solid research and data,” the spokesperson told CNN. “He is after all an academic.”
If this is what academic thought looks like to the Trump administration, it's past time to give them a failing grade.
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