Make no mistake, MAGA is the brand of powerful American psychopaths. The far-right, anti-fact, pro-corporate movement now called MAGA has long been engineered and funded by Charles Koch, whose father, beloved of Hitler, was a famous conspiracy theorist and psychopath. The ideology of the MAGA “movement”, presumably headed by Donald Trump, whose racist father was also a psychopath, is based on painful revenge against “takers”, everyone not born wealthy “booted and spurred” to rightfully ride the backs of their inferiors.
They’ve learned the lesson that Hitler first demonstrated in a modern mass media culture: if you keep true information from the public, and bombard terrified citizens with aggravating lies, the lies will come to be accepted, by most, as the truth. Once you’ve created a mass audience faithful to baseless lies, you’re halfway to ramping up the death camps. The lies are of a specific kind: incendiary reasons to fear and hate marginalized groups. Once you have created unreasoning hatred against, say, homosexuals, a gay hairdresser you illegally deport to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador deserves every rape and indignity he must endure, and forever is not long enough for a foreign government’s fully illumined dark-site to torture a sick individual like him.
Why the obsession, on the far right, with torture and the death penalty? Nothing moves the masses, and the political needle, like terror. These psychopaths (and sometimes, belatedly, their duped followers) know that total fear is the most effective tool any autocrat can wield. Horrific true stories of torture, terrifying random detention and death, the ability of the state to manhandle and murder anyone without due process or legal accountability, what could be better for an insane person hell-bent, literally, on controlling the world?
Why would a president who nonchalantly oversaw as many as 500,000 unnecessary American deaths during Covid-19, because of his damaging politically-motivated interference with scientists and pandemic experts, have any hesitation to let a few dozen, or a few hundred, or a hundred thousand, or a million, poor American children die of preventable disease? Or starvation? Or a million or two, or ten million, in Africa, Asia, South America? The answer is that psychopaths have neither empathy nor the capacity to feel regret. The worst of them, a very small percentage, are cunning serial killers. Most of them are just CEOs, surgeons, nightmare bosses, bullies, masterminds of MAGA’s revenge tour.
Some object to a psychiatric diagnosis like “psychopath” to describe someone like Charles Koch or Donald Trump, or most of Trump’s loyal inner circle “ring kissers”. I object to psychiatric diagnoses myself. Homosexuality was a a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis as recently as the 1970s. I am no fan of psychiatry and have no reason to trust the American Psychiatric Association, particularly after they publicly enforced their rule against a non-member and took part in a coordinated campaign to discredit a best-selling book that detailed Trump’s insane behavior, its roots and implications for his destructive presidency.
A group of psychiatrists and other experts made a thorough and convincing case, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump [1], acting on their professional duty to warn of the dangers of having someone with severe emotional disabilities as the American president. They made an excellent case. The APA then got busy shutting down the book, and silencing the case for questioning Trump as unstable, vengeful, dangerous, citing a rule it made after unfair criticism of far-right lunatic Barry Goldwater from a group of psychiatrists prior to Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. Fuck the APA and their “diagnostic manual”. It contains no definition of psychopath anyway.
Here’s what we know about psychopaths: they are manipulative, selfish, concerned with exercising power over others. They are adept liars, very charming and persuasive when needed. They have no hesitation to commit bold acts (of every conceivable kind) because they lack empathy and have no capacity to feel regret. They must take revenge whenever they feel slighted. Most psychopaths are very intelligent, some are not. Our Number One psychopath is not a smart psychopath, but it hardly matters. He has the genius army of the best of Charles Koch’s legal and intellectual network watching his back, guiding his revenge tour.
Trump had an argument with government scientists who predicted the path of a killer storm. He changed their map with a Sharpie, to prove he was right. Now he has defunded that agency, along with FEMA and any other government agency he feels was mean to him, contradicted him, made him feel like an enraged two year-old. Adults who react like enraged two-year olds, if they have the power to, will kill you if you make them feel like an enraged two year-old. That’s what psychopaths do, they are driven to take vengeance on anyone who makes them feel like the monsters they are. All in their life depends on the people around them recognizing and admiring their superiority. Anything else is grounds for the most terrifying revenge imaginable.
[1]
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