I've often said that if American politics were a Hollywood movie, everyone would clearly recognize the behavior of the Republicans as the villains. The fact that tens of millions of Americans want the villains to win is discouraging, but we will persevere.
This is spot on. As someone involved in political activism for a very long time, I can attest that I was called hyperbolic for predicting LESS than what he is actually doing.
"The anti-anti-Trump intellectuals. The contrarians and self-appointed heterodox thinkers who could not bring themselves to support Trump, but who found the alarm of his critics unseemly. The real threat, they insisted, was the overreaction itself. They positioned themselves as the adults in the room while the rest of us succumbed to panic.
Here is what I maintained for years, and what I will now state plainly: the obsessive fixation on leftist excess functioned as a form of cognitive capture. It rendered an entire class of otherwise intelligent people incapable of perceiving threats originating in their own ideological vicinity. They became so convinced that the republic faced imminent danger from campus speech codes and diversity initiatives that they looked upon an actual authoritarian—a man who had already attempted to overturn an election—and concluded he represented the lesser evil."
SS: Maybe it is because I am a diagnostician (MD). But since 2016, it was clear we were dealing with a nut-job, someone that cannot think beyond himself. Some of you probably consider me to be paranoid, perhaps even non-patriotic, but I would tell you that if there is anyone that can end this Earth as we know it, this piece of shit POTUS is the prime candidate. I used the term Tyrantosaurus Rex. It was not meant to be a joke. We know that T. Rex became extinct. In the case of DJT, we must expedite his extinction. At the least, I pray for his impeachment and conviction; at the most, I pray he drops dead. What really galls me is his obsession with the Peace Prize. Trump has murdered millions-between 400,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the US, to the hundreds of thousands in Ukraine, Gaza and who knows where else.
MB reasonably has typed out a litany of Trump's criminality. It goes back to his younger years in NY committing fraud with his father. Wayne Barrett, reporter for the Village Voice and book author, warned us of Trump, but we ignored this. We did a shit job in vetting Trump. We do a shit job in vetting so many of the people that affect human life and the life of the Earth.
⇢ How can we be this stupid? You don't shit where you eat. You protect and you honor a milieu as wondrous as planet Earth.
What Trump is doing now with NATO is part of the Putin playbook. Cannot you see this? Trump wants to destroy the US, and to destroy NATO. He is a Putin devotee. He loves Kim Jong-un, he admires anyone that rules with the iron hand or heel of a tyrant.
MB: "Mike Johnson, John Thune, and dare I say Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer continue to undersign the notion that this is a regular constitutional government, in form adequate to any reasonable understanding of lawful government within the confines of said laws and constitution."
SS: Absolutely; it is shocking. I would NOT want Jeffries or Schumer to be part of the government if we end the tyranny of Trump and his ass-kissing GOP Congress. I will support the younger, more aggressive, more visionary candidates as my representatives in government.
SS: I keep thinking about Forrest Gump. I am 83, have heart failure and kidney failure but I would consider walking from Oregon to Washington DC, if I could hope for a mass group joining me. But sadly, I see the citizenry in America more committed to traveling to a football game then saving the Country. Do not get me wrong. I watch college and NFL football, but it is not a priority over how this country is ruled. Would a stadium full of screaming and full committed fans also follow a Vietnam veteran, MD, former diplomat, writer, mountain climber, ocean sailor and scuba diver-- I doubt it. Perhaps if I was a 25-year old Hollywood actor it would, but not a gray-haired old man who cannot believe the legacy we are leaving future generations.
"That part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing, waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now."
Cf Mark Carney’s speech at Davos today and, following Vaclev Havel’s metaphor: take the sign out of your windows, folks. Looking at you Politico and NYT — just for starters.
I went looking for what Havel wrote in 1978 and found this gem: "Speak simple truths out loud. Totalitarian regimes are brittle. They cannot survive logic, common sense, & lived experience." Posting a sign in your window is not sufficient!
"[T]he excessive fixation on leftist excess function[ing] as a form of cognitive capture..." YES, thank you for saying this out loud. I've lost track of the number of times, in an otherwise thoughtful & intelligent piece by a small-c, anti-Trump conservative or centrist Democrat, I've had to wade through an aside of woke-bashing that has nothing to do with their main argument whatsoever. As if it's somehow a necessary & standard clause inserted to preserve their "rational" status. A statistically tiny number of incidents of over-zealousness in small, hothouse environments used to discredit all those who want "too much" change, whether that be racial, economic, or, to your point, political.
I’m so glad that someone else has noticed this “woke” bashing from MAGA Republicans. There will be an article such as Trump’s trying to take over Greenland. Then many thoughtful, intelligent comments from people. Until some red hat wearing guy comes up with brilliant comebacks like “Demtards don’t know what a real woman looks like”.
This is such a difficult pill to swallow. Realizing the people meant to uphold the law in congress could allow themselves to be bulldozed into keeping the status quo for someone who is, in no uncertain terms, the personification of evil, is so heartbreaking.
Everyone reading this: Prepare for a general strike NOW. Minneapolis will be striking this Friday in response to the ICE occupation. They had very little warning that they would be the first city to face a full ICE invasion, and yet, they are taking a stand. For all of us living outside of Minneapolis, let this be a call to arms. Will you be prepared to revoke your consent, your labor, your money, your time and energy, when the fascists move into your area? Will you read the warning signs and begin to prepare yourself, your family, your friends, and your coworkers for when the moment for bold action arises for you?
This country would come to a screeching halt if we chose to revoke our consent. Every day spent at work upholding the status quo and the fantasy of normalcy keeps the cogs of fascism turning. Every dollar you earn is taxed and funds your very own oppression.
We the People should REFUSE to work for a system that HATES us and wants to see us crushed beneath it.
Trump is a psychopathic dictator, the gravedigger of democracy, the law, freedom, nature, his EQ is at a very low level, a modern-day Hitler, Mao, Stalin.
For a long time I was just going with 'Trump is dumb'. Greedy. Selfish. Undiplomatic. Cruel. A lier. A bully. Lots of things. But Greenland sealed it. Trump is genuinely evil. There's no other word for it. His game here is the destabilization of NATO. He doesn't really want this defenseless country but just by threatening invasion, an utterly unprecedented act, he's thrown Europe into disarray.
It feels like he's serving Putin. We know he admires him and Putin hates NATO - that's part of why he invaded Ukraine. So now I'm beginning to believe the conspiracy theories that say China and Russia plotted to put Trump in power. I can't see any other rationale. Because he is their wet dream. A divided America, at war with itself, blundering about making enemies of allies and weakening itself in every way - from embarrassing international speeches, to unsanctioned military actions... bizarre behavior accompanied by incoherent social media rants, each time more outrageous than the last. Evil pure and simple. It's already gone too far. Even if Trump were removed today, the damage he's done will endure for many years to come.
For some time I have seen our President as the human embodiment of banality. His very aura seems to either be a total deterrent that sickens people or it causes people to forgo every virtue they proposed to embody. They turn to their basest instincts and a blind eye to the evil as long as their rewards are in place. I don't believe in the bible, but this man has made me reconsider the preposition of an anti-Christ..
This is one of your best pieces of work, Mike.
I've often said that if American politics were a Hollywood movie, everyone would clearly recognize the behavior of the Republicans as the villains. The fact that tens of millions of Americans want the villains to win is discouraging, but we will persevere.
Very kind words! Thank you!
This is spot on. As someone involved in political activism for a very long time, I can attest that I was called hyperbolic for predicting LESS than what he is actually doing.
"The anti-anti-Trump intellectuals. The contrarians and self-appointed heterodox thinkers who could not bring themselves to support Trump, but who found the alarm of his critics unseemly. The real threat, they insisted, was the overreaction itself. They positioned themselves as the adults in the room while the rest of us succumbed to panic.
Here is what I maintained for years, and what I will now state plainly: the obsessive fixation on leftist excess functioned as a form of cognitive capture. It rendered an entire class of otherwise intelligent people incapable of perceiving threats originating in their own ideological vicinity. They became so convinced that the republic faced imminent danger from campus speech codes and diversity initiatives that they looked upon an actual authoritarian—a man who had already attempted to overturn an election—and concluded he represented the lesser evil."
MB: Donald Trump is evil.
SS: Maybe it is because I am a diagnostician (MD). But since 2016, it was clear we were dealing with a nut-job, someone that cannot think beyond himself. Some of you probably consider me to be paranoid, perhaps even non-patriotic, but I would tell you that if there is anyone that can end this Earth as we know it, this piece of shit POTUS is the prime candidate. I used the term Tyrantosaurus Rex. It was not meant to be a joke. We know that T. Rex became extinct. In the case of DJT, we must expedite his extinction. At the least, I pray for his impeachment and conviction; at the most, I pray he drops dead. What really galls me is his obsession with the Peace Prize. Trump has murdered millions-between 400,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the US, to the hundreds of thousands in Ukraine, Gaza and who knows where else.
MB reasonably has typed out a litany of Trump's criminality. It goes back to his younger years in NY committing fraud with his father. Wayne Barrett, reporter for the Village Voice and book author, warned us of Trump, but we ignored this. We did a shit job in vetting Trump. We do a shit job in vetting so many of the people that affect human life and the life of the Earth.
⇢ How can we be this stupid? You don't shit where you eat. You protect and you honor a milieu as wondrous as planet Earth.
What Trump is doing now with NATO is part of the Putin playbook. Cannot you see this? Trump wants to destroy the US, and to destroy NATO. He is a Putin devotee. He loves Kim Jong-un, he admires anyone that rules with the iron hand or heel of a tyrant.
MB: "Mike Johnson, John Thune, and dare I say Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer continue to undersign the notion that this is a regular constitutional government, in form adequate to any reasonable understanding of lawful government within the confines of said laws and constitution."
SS: Absolutely; it is shocking. I would NOT want Jeffries or Schumer to be part of the government if we end the tyranny of Trump and his ass-kissing GOP Congress. I will support the younger, more aggressive, more visionary candidates as my representatives in government.
SS: I keep thinking about Forrest Gump. I am 83, have heart failure and kidney failure but I would consider walking from Oregon to Washington DC, if I could hope for a mass group joining me. But sadly, I see the citizenry in America more committed to traveling to a football game then saving the Country. Do not get me wrong. I watch college and NFL football, but it is not a priority over how this country is ruled. Would a stadium full of screaming and full committed fans also follow a Vietnam veteran, MD, former diplomat, writer, mountain climber, ocean sailor and scuba diver-- I doubt it. Perhaps if I was a 25-year old Hollywood actor it would, but not a gray-haired old man who cannot believe the legacy we are leaving future generations.
"That part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing, waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now."
Then I saw the armies march, saw him raise his power high
He preached: "Obey!" He practiced: "Rule!" and fattened on the ancient lie
His wheedling words, his mystic might, his ultimately iron hand
This promised hell- I know them well. Finally, I understand
Cf Mark Carney’s speech at Davos today and, following Vaclev Havel’s metaphor: take the sign out of your windows, folks. Looking at you Politico and NYT — just for starters.
I went looking for what Havel wrote in 1978 and found this gem: "Speak simple truths out loud. Totalitarian regimes are brittle. They cannot survive logic, common sense, & lived experience." Posting a sign in your window is not sufficient!
"[T]he excessive fixation on leftist excess function[ing] as a form of cognitive capture..." YES, thank you for saying this out loud. I've lost track of the number of times, in an otherwise thoughtful & intelligent piece by a small-c, anti-Trump conservative or centrist Democrat, I've had to wade through an aside of woke-bashing that has nothing to do with their main argument whatsoever. As if it's somehow a necessary & standard clause inserted to preserve their "rational" status. A statistically tiny number of incidents of over-zealousness in small, hothouse environments used to discredit all those who want "too much" change, whether that be racial, economic, or, to your point, political.
I’m so glad that someone else has noticed this “woke” bashing from MAGA Republicans. There will be an article such as Trump’s trying to take over Greenland. Then many thoughtful, intelligent comments from people. Until some red hat wearing guy comes up with brilliant comebacks like “Demtards don’t know what a real woman looks like”.
Exactly!
This is such a difficult pill to swallow. Realizing the people meant to uphold the law in congress could allow themselves to be bulldozed into keeping the status quo for someone who is, in no uncertain terms, the personification of evil, is so heartbreaking.
Everyone reading this: Prepare for a general strike NOW. Minneapolis will be striking this Friday in response to the ICE occupation. They had very little warning that they would be the first city to face a full ICE invasion, and yet, they are taking a stand. For all of us living outside of Minneapolis, let this be a call to arms. Will you be prepared to revoke your consent, your labor, your money, your time and energy, when the fascists move into your area? Will you read the warning signs and begin to prepare yourself, your family, your friends, and your coworkers for when the moment for bold action arises for you?
This country would come to a screeching halt if we chose to revoke our consent. Every day spent at work upholding the status quo and the fantasy of normalcy keeps the cogs of fascism turning. Every dollar you earn is taxed and funds your very own oppression.
We the People should REFUSE to work for a system that HATES us and wants to see us crushed beneath it.
Agree 💯 with this essay. Evil to his marrow.
Damn. This is good. Excellent. Reality. Thank you. 🙏🏽
Excellent
Trump is a psychopathic dictator, the gravedigger of democracy, the law, freedom, nature, his EQ is at a very low level, a modern-day Hitler, Mao, Stalin.
For a long time I was just going with 'Trump is dumb'. Greedy. Selfish. Undiplomatic. Cruel. A lier. A bully. Lots of things. But Greenland sealed it. Trump is genuinely evil. There's no other word for it. His game here is the destabilization of NATO. He doesn't really want this defenseless country but just by threatening invasion, an utterly unprecedented act, he's thrown Europe into disarray.
It feels like he's serving Putin. We know he admires him and Putin hates NATO - that's part of why he invaded Ukraine. So now I'm beginning to believe the conspiracy theories that say China and Russia plotted to put Trump in power. I can't see any other rationale. Because he is their wet dream. A divided America, at war with itself, blundering about making enemies of allies and weakening itself in every way - from embarrassing international speeches, to unsanctioned military actions... bizarre behavior accompanied by incoherent social media rants, each time more outrageous than the last. Evil pure and simple. It's already gone too far. Even if Trump were removed today, the damage he's done will endure for many years to come.
For some time I have seen our President as the human embodiment of banality. His very aura seems to either be a total deterrent that sickens people or it causes people to forgo every virtue they proposed to embody. They turn to their basest instincts and a blind eye to the evil as long as their rewards are in place. I don't believe in the bible, but this man has made me reconsider the preposition of an anti-Christ..
Yes. He is objectively evil. This is not a "value judgment" nor a political stance. And (dare I say here) we can all get a lot of OUGHTS from this IS.
"We all" includes our European cousins, as Gavin Newsom clearly explains: https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/newsom-in-davos-this-is-code-red