Category Archives: History and Politics

Echoes of a horrifying chapter of history

I recently watched an excellent documentary, Facing Tyranny, on PBS [1], about one of my heroes, Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a brilliant, fearless thinker and writer who was universally attacked for her frankness and irony in assessing Adolf Eichmann’s actual role in the industrialized mass murder of European Jewry (amidst the mass murder, and general slaughter, of tens of millions of others).

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial, a masterpiece, was condemned and dismissed by critics from every part of the political spectrum. Arendt commented that she understood, in hindsight, that her ironic tone about Nazi horrors (and Jewish complicity in some cases) that the public was just confronting graphically for the first time, may have led to much of the criticism. The public, she now understood, had not been ready for her ironic tone in laying out such horrors. She took a drag on her cigarette, and said “if I had it to do over again, I’d have done it the same way.” My hero.

In a traumatized society obedient to the will of a madman, where führerwortes haben gesetzeskraft (the Leader’s word has the force of law) and every one of Hitler’s brain farts immediately became the law of Germany, an unquestioningly obedient, ambitious government worker like Eichmann was completely unremarkable.

Arendt noted that Eichmann’s inability to speak with any degree of coherence, outside of defending his duty to obey the laws foaming out of the Leader’s rabid mouth, reflected his inability to think. Remove critical thinking and every monster you can imagine springs to life. Society can then be dominated by the indecent, monstrous will of unreasoning, calculating, all-powerful psychopaths.

The evil done by these evil fucks is rendered banal by the lack of thought with which they commit unspeakable atrocities and their absence of awareness and conscience as they commit their, now legal, even praiseworthy, crimes. A guy like Eichmann, Arendt noted, was simply an efficient, hard-working, unthinking member of a bureaucratic lynch mob, not the demonic architect of mass murder the Israeli prosecutor made him out to be. People tried to rough Arendt up over that banality of evil idea. Good luck, I say, take a glance around Congress.

The Senate is currently debating a big, sadistic, hideously “beautiful” bill (beautiful only for our 801 billionaires, their cumulative $6,500,000,000,000 and their corporate alter egos) that will pay for the billionaires’ massive tax cuts by removing health care from millions of working, elderly and disabled Americans and starving poor children by the millions while closing rural hospitals and nursing homes, increasing taxes on the lowest earners by an audacious 73% as it drastically cuts taxes on the wealthiest, while giving fossil fuel climate deniers (currently already subsidized $700,000,000,000 annually) infinitely more profit by squashing cheaper, sustainable American renewable energy and allowing Koch and friends to drastically raise energy prices nationwide. Oh yeah, and since the BBB will “pay for itself” by cutting the social safety net half of Americans rely on, we also need to raise the debt ceiling by $5,000,000,000,000.

There is so much ugliness in the Big Beautiful Bill (example of Orwell’s Newspeak [2], like “Truth Social”) it’s impossible to know or itemize all of it. Why would a faithful follower of Jesus Christ want to see millions of American children and old people go to bed hungry, lose health care, die unnecessary deaths in the richest country in the world? How would Jesus feel about giving more to the already obscenely rich while the poor, and their children, are immiserated further? Christian MAGA supporters will not ever confront this clear moral question, which their MAGA pastors and ministers will proactively protect them from ever asking.

Remember, MAGA would not be in power without the organized support of millions of Evangelical Christians and radically reactionary Catholics (think Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, Sammy the Bull Alito, Clarence and Ginny Thomas). How did those two groups of Christians do in Germany during the rise of the New York Times’ Mr. Hitler?

I stumbled on a Chris Hedges video discussing the work of Eric Voegelin, who studied the Nazi era (after running for his life from the Nazis in 1938) and made certain chilling connections, which are summarized in this bit from a search for Voegelin’s Hitler and the Germans.

Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Eric Voegelin [in Hilter and the Germans] discusses the historian Percy Schramm’s “Anatomy of a Dictator,” along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide.

a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide.

Here we have an American Evangelical Church whose leaders embrace a radically strange interpretation of the teachings of their Savior in flagrant conflict with those teachings, a radicalized American Catholic Church whose political leadership denies the humanity of girls and women who are rape victims (in the name of protecting the sacred fetus of the rapist), and a legal profession that… well, in Germany the doctors were the first professional group to voluntarily Nazify — being an “Aryan” and Nazi party membership were required to practice medicine in Hitler’s Germany — and, most certainly, the fucking lawyers were the second professional group to become loyal Hitlerites.

The horror, the horror. Makes me want to holler.

[1] Public Broadcasting, of course, is a deadly enemy to Trumpworld. How dare they make documentaries about radical left antisemitic Jews like Hannah Arendt? They harm innocent young white Christian children by recounting tired stories of so-called racism, slavery, and centuries of terrorism against Blacks. They don’t hate and reject gay people, as Jesus urged every Christian to do. They oppose book banning, book burning, they challenge propaganda itself sometimes! DEFUND PBS! (But watch the Arendt documentary first).

[2] In 1984, Orwell introduced the concept of Newspeak, a controlled language designed to eliminate any possibility of rebellious thoughts. By systematically reducing vocabulary, the ruling Party ensured that individuals could not even conceive of dissent, let alone articulate it. Words like “doubleplusgood” replaced more complex expressions, stripping language of nuance and ambiguity.

Newspeak operates on the principle that if certain words do not exist, the concepts they represent cannot be thought about. The language was deliberately constructed to remove any potential for subversive thought, thereby eliminating free will at the linguistic level. The ultimate goal? To make independent thinking impossible by restructuring language to serve only the Party’s ideological needs. By shrinking the range of thought through a diminishing vocabulary, Orwell emphasized how linguistic engineering could erode cognitive freedom. source

Election (fraud) Denial

Trump and the rightwing propaganda machine have done such a good, proactive, preemptive job of accusing Democrats of the crimes they themselves commit (weaponizing the DOJ, partisan hack activist judges, etc.) that it’s unthinkable for a Democrat to point out how fossil fuel billionaire Koch and Co. (with the help of Putin, Musk, Thiel, et al) almost certainly rigged the mathematically impossible 2024 election results.

These super-wealthy fascists were undoubtedly aided by harsh voter suppression laws in many states, (brought to you by a lying John Roberts/Federalist Society/Kochtopus 5-4 decision overruling a 98-0 Senate reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act).  Questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s highly improbable “mandate” (he won every swing state, a rare feat, even states otherwise swept by Democrats, with virtually identical margins, just out of automatic recount range, flipping 88 strategic counties blue to red while none flipped the other way) would make the Democrats look like whining, pouting, evidence-denying, democracy rejecting “election deniers” like Kari Lake, Trump and co.   

I find this short series very convincing, but then again, I can’t find an explanation for the 20,000,000 vote drop off in mail-in ballots (after mail-in voting increased in the 8 straight elections), except as the nefarious plan of a shameless, pugnacious Trump megadonor postmaster who retired, job done, shortly after the election.   

Let me know what you think, and share this with your group, see what they think.

Emil Bove III

Emil Bove, former Trump criminal lawyer [1], is on Trump’s short list to replace Samuel Alito, once Bove has been appointed to, and served briefly on, the federal appeals court. Bove was the acting head of the DOJ who dismissed the Eric Adams indictment and sought to keep the charges hanging over Adams’ head by dismissing the case “without prejudice” (meaning, he could prosecute at will in the future). Bove was doing this to advance Trump/Miller’s draconian deportation program by ensuring that NYC mayor Adams allowed ICE to operate freely in NYC, something Adams agreed to as part of a quid pro quo to escape prosecution for a variety of felonies.

Bove was outraged at the suggestion of a quid pro quo, as he told the judge. He also told the judge that even it was a quid pro quo, the judge still couldn’t stop DOJ from dismissing the case. Of course, after the quid pro quo was announced by Bove, U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and six other federal prosecutors resigned in protest. Four deputy mayors in Adams’ administration also resigned.

Bove sent a lawyer to federal court in Maryland to stonewall the judge (one of the many currently sued on Trump’s behalf by rabid AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ) in the Abrego Garcia abduction/rendition to El Salvador prison for terrorists case. Erez Reuveni, experienced, recently promoted DOJ lawyer, who had argued Trump’s cases zealously in the Orange Polyp’s first term, was, as his duty to the Constitution required, candid with the court.

That attorney, former DOJ assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, (I applauded the candor he was fired for at the time) is now a whistleblower, issuing a detailed warning about the corrupt orders he was given (lie to the court) by Bove, supremely loyal Nazi fuck and former Trump criminal lawyer that Trump is trying to ram on to the federal appeals court.

Bove stonewalled Congress the other day as he claimed not to recall telling Reuveni and a room full of DOJ lawyers to be ready to say “fuck you” to federal judges. “I don’t recall” said Bove, any time he was pressed, as every one of these carefully coached creeps does when a truthful answer would tank their nomination.

Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint begins:

Between March 14, 2025, and April 5, 2025, Mr. Reuveni, almost immediately after receiving notice of his promotion to serve as Acting Deputy Director of OIL, became aware of the plans of DOJ leadership to resist court orders that would impede potentially illegal efforts to deport noncitizens, and further became aware of the details to execute those plans. source

Here’s the money shot, the scene Bove claims not to recall:

Like so many other Trump Derangement Syndrome leftie commie fascist weirdos, anyone in MAGA world who does not line up to loyally do whatever they are asked, fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni was at one time, not long ago, a warrior for the mad president. Check this out.

It is a reasonable question to ask of Bove, if you have so little recall of what you said as acting head of the DOJ, since you can’t remember what every other lawyer in that suddenly silent room heard you say, should you be a fucking judge in the first place, you lying sack of sanctimonious shit?

And, since we live in a world of wrap around propaganda, here’s Rupert Murdoch, doing his part.  Language matters. Trump “reveals”…

[1] Wikipedia: In September 2023, he became a partner at Blanche Law, a law firm founded by Todd Blanche. Days later, Bove joined Donald Trump‘s criminal defense team.[12] In the state court criminal trial of Trump in New York, he was second chair to Blanche on Trump’s defense team.[18][19] Bove represented Trump in the federal classified documents and election obstruction cases.[20]

Government is not a fucking business

Try for a moment to forget that we are currently being bombarded by actual tax-payer funded advertisements made by sitting federal officials (Gabbard, Bondi, et al), shameless loyalists gushing over the great accomplishments of their Dear Leader. Robert Reich breaks down the simplistic, criminally cynical far-right claim that the government (whose purpose in a democracy is to promote the welfare of all citizens) must be run like a corporation (a judicially created “person”, a psychopath of eternal life with only one goal — monetary profit).

These Nazi fucks (right-wing billionaires and their “apolitical” corporate allies), if their claim is to be believed, and they are consistent, would consider it prudent for a democratic government to declare bankruptcy, like any other failing business, if democratic government faces the fate of the rest of Trump’s highly successful business ventures.

If I’m lying may my golden Trump sneakers get lost in the mail, like my ballot, my Trump bible, $Trump crypto, Trump NFTs and gold sprayed (in America) Trump phone, proudly made in the American minds of MAGA (all products are made in USA, even if “physically” made in China). USA! USA!!! We’re not a laughingstock anymore! We’re a great brand.

Timely message from a vampire

How did I start getting messages from the keepers of this creepy bastard’s eternal image as a great statesman?

I picture Roger Stone and the rest of these unrepentant Nazi bastards, recycling the meaningless platitudes of this lawless asshole who they all think got screwed by libtard cucks, if only they’d had FOX at that time, the Federalist Society, The Council for National Policy, all the so-called think tanks and all the rest of the accursed Kochtopus network. What a pack of  reactionary, revisionist psychos.

Anarchist Jurisdictions

A few thoughts about Trump’s obsession with violently occupying sanctuary cities, roughing up, handcuffing and sometimes even charging “Democrat” public officials (Black, Hispanic and Jew alike) and imposing his federal will, using the military, on all state and local governments, because they are godless communists who hate America and he is the democratically elected Unitary Executive who loves America and wants to save it from the savage, sick hordes of perverts in cities who make up the overwhelming majority of the American population (around 85%).

Recall that Trump’s pugnacious Attorney General, Bill Barr, declared places like New York, Chicago, LA “anarchist jurisdictions”. He and Trump threatened them, they would withhold tax dollars, paid by these jurisdictions, from coming back to them as Congress had appropriated. Using anarchist jurisdictions as his mantra, Barr sent out-of-uniform federal goon squads in unmarked vans to grab protesters off the street in Portland, overwhelmed with force and tear gassed peaceful protesters in DC to clear the way for an enraged Trump’s glaring photo op with a Bible. In one infamous, little reported incident, Barr even had a murder suspect executed by one of these squads.

In the case of the extrajudicial execution of a man suspected of killing a Trump supporter during a confrontation in Portland, Barr claimed the admitted antifa fighter had been shot to death after drawing his gun and trying to resist his peaceful arrest, as terrorists do. Eyewitnesses tell another story:

The Times article cited above details what actually happened in the “confrontation” that led to Reinoehl’s killing. Witnesses thought it was a mob hit, or a drug cartel execution. Reinoehl was walking toward his car, holding a cell phone and a bag of candy when the “confrontation” began. Two SUVs sped to the scene, cutting off Reinoehl’s car, four armed men leapt out and immediately opened fire. Nobody heard anyone identify themselves as police or yell anything else at the suspect. An unfired handgun was found in a pocket of Reinhoehl’s bullet riddled corpse, [proof that his killing by government agents was totally justified, as police investigators later found.]

Of course, who are you going to believe, the Lying New York Times, and twenty-two so-called “witnesses” who were interviewed by the paper, or men of unimpeachable integrity like Bill Barr and a president who, try as they might, simply cannot tell a lie?

source (me — citing to NY Times article)

There is always a bullshit “justice” story behind any political intimidation, oppression or corruption. The fake outrage story is particularly necessary to justify murder by governments.

The talking point that International Jewry planned and provoked the First World War, and the soon to be second, was a Nazi article of faith. It was propaganda gold, since many suspected it might be the case all along and even if the definitive book about it turned out to be fake, the truth it stated was still true. Repeat it enough times and it gains the ring of truth. “Why wouldn’t they do it?” became an obvious question.

Clearly, as exhaustively proved by the widely translated, perennially best-selling 1905 Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion [1], the leaders of a centuries old global Jewish conspiracy against Christianity met periodically, at midnight, in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, to advance their eternal plot to dominate and destroy good Christians. It was equally obvious, to the Nazi, that Bolshevism was part of this global Jewish vision of world domination by a genetically inferior, but intellectually cunning, eternal enemy of The People.

The politics of uniting a base by hatred requires giving a threatening, hateful name to an intended common enemy, a name that evokes fear. Anarchists came over from Europe in the early 20th centuries and were quickly portrayed as bomb throwing, anti-law terrorists bent on destroying America. A few were famously tried, amid great public fanfare, and executed for crimes they almost certainly hadn’t committed (Sacco and Vanzetti, to name two famous ones).

Everything old is new again. Who are the deranged and dangerous people resisting MAGA, the attempt of righteous people of faith to bring Christ, guns and paternalism back to the center of American culture and law? Anarchist, globalist, socialist, Marxist, fascists conspiring to use violent, criminal brown illegals to dominate rigged elections and bring about “majoritarian tyranny”, depriving the silent majority of their rights under cover of fake “democracy”.

Living in the intended Age of Fascist Irrationality, where insistence on lies by powerful psychopaths may NOT BE CONTRADICTED BY FACTS, this kind of incoherent horseshit is the food on which fascism feeds. If cause and effect are reversed, crucial details left out (the unfired gun remained in suspect’s pocket as he was shot repeatedly for threatening officers with a gun) if a lie is just as good as the truth, if told for the right reason, if what you see with your own eyes is a lie and what we tell you, even if contradicted by your own direct experience, is true, you’d better goddamned believe it. Or, insist on being right, and we’ll kill you. Your choice.

Shot While Escaping, by George Grosz (circa 1936):

[1]

Sources employed

Source material for the forgery consisted jointly of Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly;[9] and a chapter from Biarritz, an 1868 novel by the antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche, which had been translated into Russian in 1872.[1]: 97 

Literary forgery

The Protocols is one of the best-known and most-discussed examples of literary forgery, with analysis and proof of its fraudulent origin dating as far back as 1921.[10] The forgery is an early example of conspiracy theory literature.[11] Written mainly in the first person plural,[d] the text includes generalizations, truisms, and platitudes on how to take over the world: take control of the media and the financial institutions, change the traditional social order, etc. It does not contain specifics.[13]

. . . On October 27 and 28, 1919, the Philadelphia Public Ledger published excerpts of an English language translation as the “Red Bible,” deleting all references to the purported Jewish authorship and re-casting the document as a Bolshevik manifesto.[55] The author of the articles was the paper’s correspondent at the time, Carl W. Ackerman, who later became the head of the journalism department at Columbia University.[56][54]

Well said, David Corn!

Understand the nature of what we are all witnessing.  American fascists, who can smell the unlimited power they’ve been lusting after for decades, are driving toward totalitarianism as fast, and recklessly, as they can. And they’re doing it in the open, using all of the same techniques any Nazi type regime uses to seize and consolidate unchallengeable power. Here’s a short summary of their terror campaign of performatively brutalizing their political opponents who stand up for the due process rights of everyone on American soil.

First we have masked, ID-less feds rough up a few Black elected Democrats on public property, arrest the Black Congresswoman who is in the middle of the scrum with masked federal officers and charge her with a 17-year felony (even though the Black mayor they unlawfully arrested was never charged with any crime.) Then we rough up a Democratic Senator named Alex Padilla, trying to humiliate him by forcing him to the ground and handcuffing him, without charges and without consequence (so far). Next we throw a New York Jew, an elected NYC official and a leading Democratic mayoral candidate, against the wall of a federal building in New York City, handcuff him, seize his cell phone and detain him for three and a half hours but press no charges.  Pretty soon all this shit is normal, as the regime claims to be violently fighting “the weaponization of law enforcement.” Nazi fucks. Be careful out there, friends.

Great, important bit of reporting on Trump’s 2024 “mandate”

If you believe that the vastly unpopular, eternally angry, distracted, greedy, “transactional”, lying, increasingly deranged 47th president happened to win every swing state (a rare feat in any presidential election), by virtually identical margins (all just above the recount margin) and that the 20,000,000 ballot decline in mail-in ballots, (the first time the number hasn’t increased since 2008), had nothing to do with Trump megadonor/postmaster DeJoy’s refusal to segregate mail-in ballots or postmark them when they arrived, voter suppression laws in every red state, single drop boxes in counties of millions of voters, fake drop boxes, Russian bomb threats to Democratic precincts on Election Day, had nothing to do with Trump’s narrow victory in 2024, then the piece linked below probably won’t interest you.

To anyone who finds the narrow victory of a convicted felon (who escaped two other massive felony convictions — one for treason, under the Espionage Act, the other for a long campaign of fraud and inciting a riot to overturn election results — thanks to partisan judges he appointed), given carte blanche by an activist, partisan 6-3 Supreme Court stocked with members of a far-right judicial fraternity serving the interests of the top 0.2%, a bit suspicious, the factors laid out in this article will be of great interest to you — and hopefully lead AGs in those swing states to open investigations.

source

The failure to question so many suspicious factors in the first presidential election following an attempted coup by the winning candidate, including multiple frauds (fake electors, illegal pressure campaigns to state officials to change votes, tampering with voting machines, defaming election workers, etc.) and a violent insurrection at the Capitol, led by the former and current president, leaving aside Palantir and Musk, and their sophisticated data mining and influence operations that make Cambridge Analytica’s Brexit techniques look primitive, results in blaming the Democrats for a failed campaign, blaming Joe Biden’s slowness to step aside, blaming democracy itself for giving us a dangerous maniac president we can’t deny won fairly.

The endlessly corrupt Trump’s years of angrily lying about a “rigged”, “stolen” 2020 election, and making acceptance of that lie a condition for serving as a Republican official, have silenced anyone in his party, the corporate media, and virtually all of the Democratic party, from expressing reasonable suspicions or making charges related to what appears to be an energetically “engineered” election result. Critics probably fear appearing as delusional as sore losers like Trump, Kari Lake and the fully pardoned J6 rioters. Say what you like about their despicable techniques, but Nazis are always good at cowing opponents, especially if there are billions in corporate profits and fundraising involved.

Comment and response

In our age of the internet in your pocket, personally selected content (based on our harvested, analyzed online and conversational preferences) clamoring for our attention, when most of us are staring at smart phone and computer screens many hours a day, comment exchanges sometimes take on the aspect of a real conversation.  

You can read long comment threads under many YouTube videos, on Substack and everywhere else online and the back and forth is sometimes a great discussion, adding depth, appreciation and interesting background that the original video or piece didn’t include.  Those discussions enhance the original, make it more meaningful.   It is impressive how well-informed on certain subjects some people are. Many people are moved to write detailed comments on posts and interact in extended, informative back and forths with other commenters.  We’re living in a digital age of instant digital comment and response, at a time when face to face social interaction is in decline.

An honest talk about a compelling topic is always a great thing.  The alternative to commenting is not commenting, which the large majority of people do most of the time when it comes to online reading or viewing.   A reader’s silence has no inherent meaning, the significance of silence can only be seen in context.   Silence as the answer to a question directed at someone has a much different meaning than silence as the natural tendency of most readers after reading something.    On the other hand, “no comment” as the final comment on something of concern, has an unmistakably critical ring.

I very rarely get comments on this blahg or even a like or dislike (I don’t use ‘social media’ outside of this).  I write here frequently as part of a daily writing practice and a way of keeping track of my thoughts, events, interesting things I’ve read or seen, music, moods, ideas, a recipe.  If at some point I recall a great lecture I heard about how  Adverse Childhood Experiences [1] can cause harmful changes in the actual DNA of the grown up version of that child, I will have posted about it here and be able to easily find it to send to the person I was talking to about it. I will be able to quickly locate Steven Zipperstein’s brilliant Pogrom, for example, Shoshana Zuboff’s genius mapping of the terra incognita of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism that has swallowed and digested us all  is here.

I sometimes think of this enlightening and obvious NY Times headline I took a screen shot of at some point, a year or two after the worst of the recent mass death event, the Covid-19 pandemic. It explains a lot.

Many of those infected with Covid-19 that the virus did not kill are suffering the long-term effects of the disease, effects still not completely understood by science. Millions have also been broken in various ways by the terrifying prolonged traumatic experience of a highly contagious, international mass death spreading invisibly throughout human populations everywhere. Recall how frightful the early days of the outbreak were, before the vaccine, before we knew how to protect ourselves and each other, and how much insane behavior occurred, particularly here, in the United States, where our death toll, because of this insanity, was the largest of any nation, and close to the top of the per capita Covid-19 death list worldwide [2]. Imagine the effect on young children and adolescents, a mental health crisis rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed. Suck it up, you insane little bastards!

The human race, across the globe, has been recently mass traumatized by the pandemic and the effects are demonstrated in mass behavior worldwide. We have all been traumatized by it, few have escaped the effects of this long communal terror and all of the other strong feelings this terror evoked. When people are freaked out, people we don’t like can quickly take on the aspect of monsters, inhuman in their greed, stupidity, anger, sorrow, hypocrisy, whatever it is that distorts them into purely destructive beings without any redeeming feature.

I got a rare comment the other day, to my post about Kristi Noem’s lying about Senator Padilla being wrestled to the ground because he was “lunging at” her and hadn’t identified himself as a Senator (he had). In the course of it I wrote, describing the selective, irrational, often counter-factual, lying arguments of MAGA officials: This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.

I had a long comment applauding this essential bit of truth and then running with it. The comment quoted numerous writers and thinkers I’d never heard of and included a link to a post written by someone who’d sent a critical comment to the British Medical Journal that the BMJ had declined to publish. Clicking the link to a blahg and starting to read the unpublished comment, it made sense that a scientific journal would decline to publish it, but official science’s refusal to publish it was cited as proof of science’s complicity in the worldwide conspiracy of deadly psychopaths. The comment continued into vaccine skepticism (with quotes and links) and conspiracy theories based on the coordinated actions of a worldwide cabal of undisclosed psychopaths.

I don’t dispute that many, probably most, CEOs, the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association, the far-right political activist billionaires who have waged a long war against “majoritarian tyranny” and the “administrative state”, those who embrace obvious lies for political advantage (99% of Republicans in Congress) are likely psychopaths, or, pragmatically obedient to psychopaths. That’s a different belief than, say, the antinatalist position that since we are not asked to consent to our own births (a tricky proposition, as even antinatalists must concede) that we are born involuntarily, into a life of pain, which gives us a moral obligation to liberate others about to be born without any choice in the matter [3].

The online world is an impossibly massive psychic battleground where intelligent, useful theories and idiotic and destructive ones are given equal weight by tens of millions worldwide, depending on how they hit individuals emotionally. Content moderation is something we routinely do in our daily lives, such as when confronted by advocates of the theory that powerful blood-drinking child raping cannibals like Tom Hanks control the liberal elites and the Deep State that persecutes White Christian Men.

For years YouTube posted links under sketchy videos, alerting viewers that the content contradicted known facts and should be viewed in that light. The owners of youTube have recently agreed with Trump/Musk/Thiel (three famous, extremely powerful psychopaths) that content moderation should be relaxed. You will, presumably, no longer have a corrective link under a January 6 riot video purporting to show that every rioter was a liberal, communist, FBI provocateur or Antifa supporter dressed as MAGA nation, that MAGA was completely peaceful and engaged only in “legitimate political discourse” and that all of the 1,600 rioters pardoned by Trump are owed large settlements for wrongful prosecutions and convictions. Same for the insane RFK Jr.’s claims about medicine, vaccines, toxic water, government bureaucracy, science, research, cancer, child malnutrition, etc.

As a matter of kindness and respect I wanted to post the guy’s long, gnarly, problematic comment and reply sympathetically to what I agreed with. As a matter of online responsibility, I couldn’t figure out how to do it without a bit of content moderation, which I would have applied to the sections about Covid, vaccines and so on. In the end, I’ll never know if the long, detailed comment was from a person or generated by AI (it was suspicious to me that there was no link or identifying information about the person making the comment, which was forwarded to me by WordPress).

We humans are really on our own out here.

[1] Apparently the CDC website/DOGE bots have not gone over and combed out this page, last updated 10-4-24. I suspect the current boss, floridly insane former long-time heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will make short work of this webpage, if it ever comes to his attention. Here’s a screenshot for posterity:

[2]. (From Wikipedia)

State and local responses to the pandemic during the public health emergency included the requirement to wear a face mask in specified situations (mask mandates), prohibition and cancellation of large-scale gatherings (including festivals and sporting events), stay-at-home orders, and school closures.[29] Disproportionate numbers of cases were observed among Black and Latino populations,[30][31][32] as well as elevated levels of vaccine hesitancy,[33][34] and there was a sharp increase in reported incidents of xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans.[35][36] Clusters of infections and deaths occurred in many areas.[b]The COVID-19 pandemic also saw the emergence of misinformation and conspiracy theories,[39] and highlighted weaknesses in the U.S. public health system.[17][40][41]

In the United States, there have been 103,436,829[3] confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,193,165[3] confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide.[42] The COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in the country’s history.[43] It was the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer.[44] From 2019 to 2020, U.S. life expectancy dropped by three years for Hispanic and Latino Americans, 2.9 years for African Americans, and 1.2 years for White Americans.[45] In 2021, U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 rose,[46] and life expectancy fell.[47]

[3] Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Wikipedia

What lying, ignorant, loyal Kristi Noem said before Senator Padilla was wrestled out of the room for asking a question

Context is everything in life. A person cannot determine cause and effect, or the nuances of who is in the right and who is wrong, without the context and sequence of what happened. The sequence of events is an observable set of actions and reactions, the justifiability of these actions and reactions is what lawyers argue over in trials. Leave out the cause, or something in the sequence of events, or even just create doubt about whether it happened just that way, and the effect can be made to seem completely insane, the person making the complaint a lunatic and a nuisance. This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.

When I refer to Noem lying, consider her false claim, immediately after her squad forcibly put Padilla face down on the ground and senselessly handcuffed a citizen who was not resisting, legally detained or arrested, that Senator Padilla didn’t identify himself. He loudly said his name and title, on video, as Noem’s heavy handed security team started. Noem’s lying claim is contradicted in real time, it’s on videotape for fuck’s sake. This lie is far from her first as HHS Secretary, do a quick search for many more.

Her ignorance is reflected in her under-testimony definition of habeas corpus: the president’s constitutional right to detain anyone he deems an enemy. In fairness to the Secretary [1], maybe she meant enema. She’s an ignoramus, but loyal as hell.

Heather Cox Richardson, with another crucial detail about the ugly fascist strongarming of a peaceful senator the corporate media is scrupulously avoiding (corporate persons will be corporate persons, that is, psychopaths highly focused only on their own best interests):

While much focus has been on the assault [on Senator Padilla] itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

source

“We are not going away,” Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In fairness to someone with Noem’s intellectual and moral capacities, she may not realize that she is parroting Nazi positions in her devotion to the Führereid [1] that was the condition for her obtaining a position she is wildly, tragically, unqualified for. She is an international security threat dressed up as a MAGA Barbie Doll, so cute with those hats and sassy outfits.

“We are not going away,” Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

[1] from Wikipedia: The Hitler Oath (German: Führereid or Führer Oath)—also referred in English as the Soldier’s Oath[1]—refers to the oaths of allegiance sworn by officers and soldiers of the Wehrmacht and civil servants of Nazi Germany between the years 1934 and 1945. The oath pledged personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler rather than loyalty to the Weimar Constitution of the country.

[2] Almost put in as the international security and anti-terrorism credentials of Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem the CV of her fellow cabinet member, Tusli Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence nobody but Putin can trust:

I wrote (and deleted):

She has long been friendly with Vladimir Putin and routinely echoes his talking points on US mass media. As a member of Congress she flew to Syria to visit with Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, and returned defending him, even as he continued his murderous war on Syrians to cling to power he eventually was forced out of.

There’s also this:

Gabbard launched her 2020 presidential campaign running on an anti-interventionist and populist platform, but dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden in March 2020. Previously, she also served as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2013 to 2016 but resigned to endorse Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. After her departure from Congress in 2021, Gabbard took more conservative positions on issues such as transgender rights, border security, and foreign policy. In 2022, she spoke at the conservative CPAC conference and left the Democratic Party.