First, the great Heather Cox Richardson, on heroism:
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2025.
Bob Garfield’s picture, and caption, worth 1,000 words
Robert Reich, with a few words of hope:
Not to mention the billionaires Trump is putting in charge of key departments to decide on taxes and expenditures, tariffs and trade, even what young Americans learn — all of whom have brazen conflicts of interest.
They’ll all be on display today with Trump. Then, many will take their private jets to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual confab of the world’s most powerful CEOs and billionaires.
Not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century has such vast wealth turned itself into such conspicuous displays of political power. Unapologetically, unashamedly, defiantly.
This flagrancy makes me hopeful. Why? Because Americans don’t abide aristocracy. We were founded in revolt against unaccountable power and wealth. We will not tolerate this barefaced takeover.
And a very important reminder, from Timothy Snyder’s list of twenty important things to keep in mind during a time in history like the one we live in:
10. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
As the nation observes the national holiday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (and racist legislators in Alabama and Mississippi also celebrate gentleman traitor Robert E. Lee), a billionaire-studded contingent will be on hand, in a warm room, the paying crowd and mass of police outside freezing, to witness the historic swearing in of a president who stole top secret government documents as he left the White House after fomenting a many tentacled criminal conspiracy culminating in a violent insurrection to prevent certification of his election loss. Never in American history has this 1933 German scenario been played out: a ruthless and vindictive dictator, hellbent on absolute power, found guilty of major crimes, implicated in deaths, being sworn in as the lawful head of state. Brings to mind this expressive gif:
We have had racist presidents before. I was taught that Woodrow Wilson was an important progressive president who started the income tax and was the moral force behind the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN. What every Black person I’ve ever discussed Wilson with already knew, I had to learn. Born in the South in 1856, he was a boy during the Confederacy and the Civil War. He hated Blacks and ordered the resegregation of the federal civil service as soon as he got into office. He also hosted DW Griffith, director of the groundbreaking 1915 cinematic epic Birth of A Nation, at the White House. Griffith screened the first film ever shown at the White House. I was subjected to much of this film as a graduate student and will summarize what I saw.
After the Civil War, down in the persecuted southland, Blacks were strutting around, completely out of control. They were rich, and gaudily flaunted their wealth, lording their newfound power over the downtrodden whites, who they bullied. Good Christian white folks were being dominated by these overbearing Blacks and were legitimately intimidated, particularly since the Blacks were backed by a hostile army of Union soldiers with rifles and bayonets. White women were in constant danger of rape by the out of control, savage Black men. It is likely that more than one struggling white woman was dragged off to be defiled off screen by the savage Blacks, as the white men watched in hopeless horror.
In reel two or three a noble group of selfless modern day knights arose, to protect female Christian purity from these sick, depraved former slaves, now domineering oppressors. They rode in on horseback, looking absolutely ridiculous in their stylized Ku Klux Klan regalia, the piano music swelled (it was a silent film) and soon these heroes were giving holy hell to the Blacks, who richly deserved it. My classmates and I were all relieved when the long class was over, though the film had another hour yet to go. The professor tried to get us to stay, I don’t think any of us did.
The racist progressive Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States and klan sympathizer, had this comment about DW Griffith’s groundbreaking masterpiece:
So the upcoming horror show with the current cast of depraved and destructive psychopaths, while sickeningly real, with their ability to write history in something much more powerful than lightning (for political purposes), also has to be kept in perspective. Extreme enough pain can jar us out of apathy and despair and mobilize us to find a cure.
When the finality of an ugly, senseless conflict with a group of my longtime friends, who refused to consider the truth before pronouncing an irreversible death sentence, became painfully clear to me, when the brutal irrationality of it hurt badly enough every single day, I had to wake up. Waking up from a nightmare and recovering yourself can be hard, but if the nightmare is hellish enough, wake you it will.
This upcoming shitstorm will wake enough of us up to fight it to a standstill and disable it in 2026, or indifferent fate will allow the very worst of human possibility moving forward. For me, I don’t intend to leave any of this up to fate.
From the personal to the political, there are some people who cannot be wrong, no matter what they might have done. A mountain of evidence, a clear chain of cause and effect, the corroborating testimony of 250 eye witnesses, incriminating statements they themselves repeatedly make — angrily reduced to the satanic work of sick, evil haters determined to unfairly persecute them, out of pure, blind spite, malice, irrational hatred. The person who can never be wrong must remake the world into a place that always serves them without question or contradiction, in order to make themselves feel irrefutably right, no matter what.
It’s disorienting, especially at first, to realize the relatively small role rationality, common sense, plays in many lives, in mass politics and in history. In the name of an abstract higher cause, masses of people will reflexively reject the facts, cause and effect, all appeals to human empathy, if it suits their larger need to belong, to feel righteous and correct. The Capitol policeman crying out in pain as an enraged mob crushed him in the doorway he was defending during the January 6 riot? Bullshit, a paid crisis actor pretending to be in pain, a cynical play by evil commies to blame perfectly peaceful tourists they want to viciously paint as trespassing rioters! That eyeball gouged out of another officer’s head? His own fault for fighting true patriots in the name of a sick, insane cheater and traitor!
An infuriating lie is effective because it is short, conclusive, easy to repeat and impossible, once repeated over and over, to disabuse people of. “They’re eating the pets!” was a laugh line for Kamala and millions of us, but it was instantly memorable and damn good for fundraising, for turning up the already boiling pot of outrage against imagined hoards of disgusting vermin who are raping young white girls and poisoning our nation’s blood [1].
The professional liar has a transactional, self-serving view of other people. It is a transgressive thrill for fans of the liar that reality itself must conform to the liar’s framing and the so-called truth, that a lie can instantly render what did or didn’t actually happen impotently irrelevant. The liar “owns” his hated enemies with his infinite ability to change the facts on demand. The power of a venerated liar’s reframing is that it blurs then obliterates every other narrative. Truth and lies are transactional commodities just like anything else employed in the art of the deal. To millions among us, increasingly, objective truth is whatever we most fervently believe to be true. That belief does not make things that actually happened disappear, but the belief that they disappear is good enough for most people.
The psychopathic personality, with its insatiable need to dominate and feel superior to others, can never be satisfied in the way most people are satisfied. If it has $10,000,000,000, it must have $100,000,000,000, $1,000,000,000,000, because it is intolerable that some other greedy bastard can have more billions than they do. What will they do to achieve their endlessly out of reach goal? Everything you can think of and many things you can’t imagine. No price is too high for others to pay for the realization of the powerful psychopath’s blind desire.
We have a front row seat now to watch these sick fucks in action as they take positions of power in the new government. The incoming president will have a cabinet full of them, and there are hundreds more waiting in the wings when he starts firing this first batch. For every George Soros, a wealthy man with a social conscience, there are a hundred billionaires who will embrace any Nazi, klansman or Putinist who promises them even more wealth and power. Robert Reich published this clip from the 1930s NY Times as an illustration of what we are seeing right now among our “greatest citizens” and their corporate avatars:
I recently got an email containing the perfect encapsulation of the absolutist worldview of someone who can never be wrong. I’d written in detail to a cousin about a lifelong conflict with my father, a man with many great qualities, and an uncontrollable need to never be wrong. I provided many examples of the senselessness of this long war, of my many attempts at reconciliation. I included quotes of my father’s genuine regret, right before he died, sadly acknowledging my many unrequited attempts to make peace over the years. He harshly berated himself for his inability to reciprocate, and expressed terrible self-loathing for having turned our relationship into a battle to the death instead of being an empathetic father capable of a loving, mutual relationship. He explained what I already understood, that he acted this way because he was crushed in his soul, finished for life at age two, as he put it, by a furious, violent mother who beat all hope out of him.
The response I received from this cousin struck me as a textbook illustration of the psychotic worldview. In short, clipped sentences it stated a series of irrefutable facts, the world as he understood it. Conspicuously absent was any reference to anything I’d written, any question I’d posed. Statement: the father I’d portrayed, Irv #1, was essentially my unrecognizably distorted creation, the product of my angry, conflict-prone personality, divorced from lived reality and entirely my burden.
The person this cousin had experienced, who he dubbed Irv #2, had absolutely nothing in common with my Irv #1. Irv #1 and Irv #2 were irreconcilable entities and no matter how much information I provided him, how many quotes of Irv’s actual deathbed regrets and self-recriminations, he would never see anything but his pure, loving view of the very best of the man. I would never get any acknowledgment of anything I ever said or wrote to this person, no conversation was possible — in describing my father truthfully, and with nuance, I had crossed into the dark side. I was now a betrayer of a loving memory and entitled only to a series of icy statements of fact.
This cousin is highly intelligent, has a scientific turn of mind, an engineering background, yet he couldn’t acknowledge that every person contains multiple aspects, strengths, weaknesses, conflicting desires, contradictory behaviors. We show different sides of ourselves to different people, at different times. Picture a Venn diagram showing aspects of the personalities of his two opposing, irreconcilable Irvs, there is always an overlap of desirable and undesirable traits, unless the person is that exceedingly rare outlier who is somehow purely one or the other. The response I got stated, essentially — I see black, you see white. There can be no ambiguity, no discussion, no room for compromise in this world, no nuance, nor any color. The very things Irv #1 bitterly lamented never experiencing as he voiced regrets the last night of his life.
“I imagine how much richer my life would have been,” my father, Irv #1/Irv #2, said in a dying man’s voice, “if I had been able to see all the nuance, gradation and color in the world instead of seeing everything in harsh, childish black and white. The world’s not black and white, Elie.”
Human affairs is black and white only if you are damaged in your soul beyond the ability to perceive the human complexities and colorful, sometimes terrible, contradictions we all contain. Absurd as it sounds, this crabbed logic (A or B, never both) leads to propositions like — a philanthropist cannot also be a cold hearted criminal, even if there is ample proof that the person is, in fact, both of these things.
The final appeal of the psychopath’s worldview is that, if you can accept it, all ambiguity and complication is removed from this complex, challengingly nuanced world. That this freedom from uncertainty comes at the cost it does is of little concern to people desperate for the righteous relief provided by knowing who to love and who to hate, without ever having to meet them.
Every person who can never be wrong, always blames others and fights to the death every time, knows the importance of controlling the narrative of what actually happened. If you can never be wrong, you tell the story in a way that makes you the brutally, viciously abused victim. The sick person who abused you, in your story, is the one who deserves rage and violence, because you were totally innocent, as always. It’s hard being perfect in a world of jealous weaklings.
Thankfully, there were no long lasting psychological, health, or political effects of a deadly, highly contagious disease that had portable morgues outside of hospitals to deal with the overflow of American corpses. Americans are by nature (and national myth) too healthy and optimistic to let something like a plague stop us from doing the work of America. This is what we have now, the answer to all of our prayers…
You can read about this creep, appointed by Donald Trump, and wonder why, after covering up the destruction of all January 6 Secret Service texts and phone logs, and those of other key DHS officials, and paying out over a million to settle suits related to his “official acts” as Inspector General, he is still serving, and ready to do his master’s bidding again on January 20th. Read about him here.
Here’s a disgustingly flavorful chunk of that article, which notes Biden has taken no action for months since getting the report, stating:
The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s integrity committee found that Cuffari provided wrongfully inaccurate and misleading answers during his nomination process to become DHS IG, spent $1.4 million to hire a law firm likely to retaliate against three OIG senior executives who questioned his qualifications and attempted to influence the firm’s independent investigation into those employees.
Cuffari, who was appointed by Donald Trump, was also accused of diminishing and delaying reports about sexual harassment at DHS, not informing Congress in a timely and adequate manner that the Secret Service deleted text messages related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and deleting his own work-related text messages.
I never believed for a second that Joe Biden suffers any age-related dementia. He’s slower, he stutters, he’s always been famous for being a gaffe machine, but he’s sharp and coherent every time I hear him speak. With the glaring exception of his glassy-eyed cold medication addled zombie imitation disaster (don’t get me wrong, his zombie imitation was impeccable) during the first half of the infamous debate against Trump, which only confirmed to the live audience what corporate media had been saying the whole time: Biden, unlike Trump, is not fit to be president.
That said, what the fuck, Joe? Why is this openly corrupt Inspector General still in office, four years after covering up the destruction of all evidence of what happened, from the Homeland Security point of view, before, during and after the MAGA riot on January 6th? You can’t blame Merrick Garland for this one, Biden, or the Senate committee that needs to vote out USPS Board nominees to get rid of equally abhorrent fucking Looey DeJoy. Cuffari is an executive branch employee, directly accountable to you. He is untrustworthy and has taken direct action to protect your criminal predecessor/successor. What the fuck, Joe?
Pages 49-52 of the smirking, corrupt postmaster’s prepared statement address the USPS credo about transparency and accountability. Those policies amount to 403 Error, suckers. There is no such thing as transparency and accountability in a pay to play corporatized democracy where secrecy is essential for corrupt business as usual.
There is no available public information about committee vote deadlocks that stall things like a meaningful hearing with DeJoy BEFORE the election (to ask him why, for example, he refused the IG’s request to post mark mail-in ballots the day they are received or segregate mail-in ballots from the millions of other undelivered letters in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election) or why, and how (and by whom, Kyrsten Sinema?) the confirmation of any of Biden’s three picks for vacant USPS board of directors positions was stonewalled until Trump won the election?
You know what would be nice? A tally of how many mail-in votes were cast and counted in 2024. Would anyone be surprised to see the lowest rates of delivery of Democratic voter ballots (by zipcode) in the seven swing states (all won by DeJoy’s candidate by virtually identical margins)? There is no information anywhere on the internet, outside of recent updates like this one.
If you can do the calculation you’ll find out how many mail-in ballots were cast:
88,380,679 mail-in and early in-person votes cast nationally
48% of these were by mail.Making the total over 40,000,000. How many did DeJoy leave in the sorting houses, mixed with all the other late delivered and never delivered mailings? Nobody seems to have reported on any of that. Though the poor fucker was put through the wringer by House and Senate Committees 40 days before his benefactor is peacefully sworn in as the first felon who incited a riot to disrupt government and stay in power ever legally elected president of these United States.
In the 2020 election, 43% of all votes cast, more than 66 million ballots, were cast by mail (per US Census Bureau — which has no information on 2024, of course). Why the big drop off in 2024 when mail-in voting has increased in every presidential election since 2008?Until 2024, of course when it precipitously dropped by over 40%.
Ballotpedia.org was a decent source for this kind of info. Click.
Hah, what are you going to do? Democracy dies in darkness, boys and girls. LO fucking L!
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