Ignoreland

In 1992, the rock band R.E.M. released an album called Automatic For The People, and it contained a song called “Ignoreland.” For most of their career to that point, R.E.M. had generally steered away from politics in their music, but on this tune, they unleashed their feelings about the state of American political discourse of that time.  

Bassist Mike Mills told the Boston Globe: “That’s what ‘Ignoreland’ is – America. It’s about people who only get their information from sound bites and television.”   

One of the lyrics is: “The information nation took their clues from all the sound-bite gluttons.” 

The interesting thing about the song and its point is how well it predicted our current culture more than 30 years ago. Back then, Fox News and MSNBC didn’t exist, both still four years away from launching. The internet was barely accessible to the public. There was no social media.  

Listening to the song now feelsmore reflective of today’s reality than 1992 in terms of how people these days sacrifice thoughtful reading, research, and reflection at the altar of memes and social media feeds that are based on narrowcasting only toward topics and points of view that they agree with. 

President Trump’s second term is already shaping up to be its own modern version of “Ignoreland,” one in which data, facts, history, and expert opinion on a variety of topics is willfully ignored.  

The president’s tariff flip-flop is a great example. There was no shortage of well-respected economists, investment banks, and CEOs, many of them conservatives, loudly decrying President Trump’s widespread, head-spinning approach to the tariffs.Targeted and strategic tariffs can be extremely useful in balancing trade, they said, but the nearly blanket tariffs of the size he unleashed on “Liberation Day” had the potential to crater the economy and liberate us all from our hard-earned savings.Stock and bond markets swooned, and within weeks,the market was on a path for its worst April since the Great Depression.  

By late April, the CEOs of four of the country’s largest retailers gathered at the White House to warn the president directly that without a change in course, shelves would be empty in weeks, with the price of goods considerably higher. A day later, he softened his stance on China and indicated the 145% tariffs he imposed on the country would come down “substantially” in any trade deal cut between the two countries. Markets soared. 

I’m sure President Trump read many of the same reports I did on the difficulty of winning a tit-for-tat trade war with China. China’s manufacturing base isconsiderably bigger and far more automated than ours, giving them an advantage in keeping prices lower. The country’s historic threshold for inflicting misery on its own population greatly exceeds ours. China’s President Xi will likely hold onto power long after President Trump’s term and will do virtually anything to ensure it.  

All ignored. Now we’ve ceded leverage in any negotiations by bluffing and blustering with a weaker hand, then caving.  

President Trump also ignored the advice of many economists and even some in his own administration with his threats to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. It was, again, only after the market wobbled that he declared he had “no intention” of firing Powell. 

Not only does the administration ignore expert advice, it’s actively erasing data that underpins it in ways that have the potential to harm everyday Americans.  

The nonprofit news organization ProPublica released a detailed report on April 18 examining the ways the administration’s slashing of the federal workforce is having the unintended (perhaps?) consequence of eliminating key measurements and data that typically inform an administration’s decision- and policymaking. 

“Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators, and medical providers nationwide,” the story said. “The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.” 

The article goes on to cite examples of data no longer being collected due to job cuts, and in some cases, existing data just disappearing. These include dismantling the entire team that collects surveys from women before and after giving birth, “a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.” 

The Office of Homeland Security hasn’t released its monthly reports on deportation and immigration enforcement since November of last year, making it impossible to validate any claims the administration is making on immigration. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gutted the staff that tracks accidental deaths and injuries, including fatal shootings, poisonings, and car accidents, again making it difficult to assess the administration’s “tough on crime” stance going forward. 

Granted, the administration is consciously doing away with some reports they felt didn’t align with their priorities going forward, such as the EPA’s “EJScreen,” which stands for Environmental Justice and measures the impact that pollution has on communities. Easy to understand why that’s a target for the administration. 

But the widespread and chaotic data cleansing across the board feels largely arbitrary with no real strategy or awareness of the long-term consequences, similar to the president’s tariff approach. 

Interestingly, the ProPublica story makes a point that Project 2025, widely considered the policy strategy the administration is executing, “is chock full of references to data-based decision making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the administration to collect and share even more data than its predecessors had.” 

One of the final lyrics on “Ignoreland” is “I know that this is vitriol, spleen venting, no solution.” 

Many will likely apply that description to this column, but I do have a solution for President Trump: Heed Project 2025’s insistence on data-based decision making and pay attention to people who know what they’re talking about.