Happy 4/20, y’all

With the same sick irony that had Trump’s second inauguration fall on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, Easter Sunday, this year, falls on the 136th birthday of one of Trump’s main idols, Mr. Hitler. On a personal note, two years ago today I was wheeled out of the David Koch pavilion of the #1 hospital for orthopedics fourteen years in a row, into the sunshine of a nice spring day, with a brand new titanium and chromium left knee. Presently I am unable to walk around the block with my six year-old neighbor, which I miss. Seeing the world through the eyes of a bright young kid is a wonderful thing, particularly in springtime, as is being able to walk without pain.

But enough with the personal sob stories. Today is the day that the myopic intellectuals and reactionary lawyers employed by far right billionaires submit their arguments to the Leader for why he should impose a version of martial law under the 1807 Insurrection Act so that he can use the military to end these large demonstrations by US citizens increasingly organizing against Project 2025’s determinedly fascist moves. After all, Trumpie has already used emergency war powers to arrest, detain and deport US residents for indefinite stays in a cool 43 year-old dictator’s super-max prison for “terrorists”. What war, you ask? Dubya and Cheney’s “War on Terror” authorized by Congress shortly after 9/11 under the AUMF [1], an authorization that made the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq perfectly kosher and that never expires, apparently. If the president calls it “terror”, who is Congress to question that?

As soon as he was in the Oval Office Trump issued an executive order calling for a report, within 90 days, from the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security Director, assessing the need to invoke the Insurrection Act for the “emergency” at the southern border. Today is day 90 since inauguration day. Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem will sign whatever report is put in front of them, one of the conditions for their appointment as Trump ass-lickers, the same condition accepted by everyone in MAGA.

Presumably, at some point today, probably this evening when the Leader is done cheating at golf to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, the press will announce what Hegseth, Noem, Mike Flynn, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Samuel Alito, Leonard Leo, Charles Koch et al have decided about the president’s right to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. I’m not a betting man, but it’s not hard to guess what this crew of insane, ethically compromised haters will endorse. Particularly now that public opposition to Trump’s purposefully mad leadership is mounting and even reaching some in his own party.

The likeliest outcome, it saddens me to say, is a conspiracy among these lawless maniacs, on the brink of their longtime dream of American fascism, to create a mass death event at some peaceful assembly, call it “terrorism,” blame several marginalized groups for the act they themselves organized and carried out, and bring down the curtain on American democracy once and for all with legally sanctioned state violence. State violence to repress violence they themselves provoke (and often perpetrate as an excuse for martial law) is the go to move of every dictator.

As former civil liberties advocate turned Nazi defender Alan Dershowitz said, defending Trump during his second impeachment for inciting an insurrection, that if the president truly thinks the Jews are using space lasers to unfairly destabilize his absolute rule, he has the right to do whatever he feels is necessary to stop them from using these immensely powerful imaginary weapons in a way that harms the nation. In the words of Nixon, echoed by John Roberts and the Five Moral Dwarves in the unironically captioned Trump v. US, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Happy Easter to my Christian friends and may the mercy of the Eternal be upon us all as we wait for the ABC headline.

[1] Wikipedia: The Authorization for Use of Military Force is a joint resolution of the United States Congress which became law on September 18, 2001, authorizing the use of the United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks. The authorization granted the president the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. Wikipedia

How a headline frames the story

This DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, was placed on leave by Trump’s DOJ and then summarily fired for being candid to a judge in a federal court. His only struggle, as an officer of the court, was trying not to lie or be evasive in response to the judge’s questions. Reading it most charitably to ABC, the DOJ did struggle in Maryland migrant case, though Reuveni did not.

Or as the New York Times told it at the time:

Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.

The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .

. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.

Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”

A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.

source

But corporate media like ABC (who already wrote a fat check to Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit the president brought against them for a truthful on air statement by one of their talking heads), you know they have to be so careful, because access and frivolous lawsuits and extortion and shakedowns and threatened shutdowns and loss of license, and baseless defamation claims, the threat of censorship and the demand to obey an advance and loss of sponsorships.

Falling into corporate disfavor by alienating the powerful, and vengeful, is suicidal behavior for a corporation. So you write the headline that frames it in the best light for the guy you just wrote the multimillion dollar check to Trump’s “library” to avoid a lawsuit you could have easily had dismissed. Hence: THE DOJ LAWYER WHO REFUSED TO LIE TO OR STONEWALL THE JUDGE STRUGGLED IN COURT.

USA! USA!!!

Intermittent Empathy

I described my mother as someone with intermittent empathy. She could be very empathetic but she could also be completely oblivious to what other people needed or wanted. How, the therapist asked, can someone be intermittently empathetic?

My mother was beaten down by her mother. An only child, raised by a talented, demanding, strong-willed mother whose entire family had been murdered in Ukraine when my mother was fifteen, she bore the brunt of her mother’s sorrows, terrors and frustrations. Her father was sympathetic, but also dominated by my grandmother, he could only do so much to protect his daughter. My mother clearly grew up with a lot of pain and anger she constantly had to push down. As a result she had a very low threshold for frustration and flew into anger very easily.

My father had it even worse than my mother. His mother, a tiny, religious maniac famous for her uncontrollable temper, literally whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. On his deathbed my father finally acknowledged the damage this had done to him. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he said in a raspy, dying man’s voice.

When my father flew into a rage my mother was always quick to join in. It is, I understand now, a primitive, childish reaction, the same one that animates any lynch mob. Another person’s righteous rage, forcefully expressed, gives you permission to vent your own righteous, often inchoate, anger. As a child I was regularly exposed to this tour de force tag team of parental immaturity. There was little I could do, during an onslaught, outside of telling them both to fuck off. This response, of course, made their anger all the more righteous and me all the more deserving of it.

Intermittent empathy works like this. Hours after the bloody conflict, when my mother was calm, and by herself, I’d sometimes be able to present my side of the most recent dinner table battle. I’d lay out what happened from my point of view. She would listen. Sometimes I’d be able to persuade her that I’d been treated unfairly. When I was able to get my mother’s understanding, I felt her empathy. I have to believe that this intermittent empathy probably saved me from my sister’s fate. My sister, never really having experienced either of our parents’ empathy, until late in life when our father became her chief ally and emotional and financial supporter, became exactly the dreaded parent that tormented and damaged her as a child.

I had a close friend, call him Flack. He often expressed his torment at how difficult it was to get empathy or support from his superficially charming wife, call her Gina. He told me many times, with a lot of emotion, how humiliating it was to have to beg for things from a life partner who should give him those things without being asked.

Empathy, of course, is at the top of the list of what each of us needs from our intimates. I’ve learned, since my execution at Gina’s orders, that Gina is an extreme case, probably a psychopath in her need to be right no matter what and her uncontrollable desire for maximum punishment of anyone who makes her feel wrong. Flack, it turns out, is the classic vulnerable narcissist, he will do anything for anybody at any time, even strangers, and he is heroic in these public efforts, but he is vigilant and quick to rage at anyone who might notice his rigid need to be seen as perfect.

No human has ever been perfect of course, but if you are damaged enough to believe you must be perfect, it’s probably impossible to recover from that. Empathy for the imperfections of others as a first reflex is ideal. I tell you I’m hurt, you ask me why. You listen, show you understand why I’m hurt. Then you can talk about the intricacies of the situation, propose solutions, etc. Empathy ideally comes first. It is the hallmark of our healthiest, most life-sustaining relationships. In my experience, with most people, empathy is often intermittent, as my mother’s was.

People are self-centered, defensive, distracted, react with solutions before they hear the problem, want to fix things before they know what’s broken. We are humans, puny earthlings. Still, empathy that has to be prompted by a clear, calm presentation, is infinitely better than what my old friend Flack has to contend with — token empathy conditioned on absolute obedience to the will of someone with very little empathy.

Given the choice, we’d all like empathy without having to ask for it. Also given the choice, real empathy we can elicit from someone else is infinitely preferable to the situation Flack finds himself in. With a mate incapable of empathy he is always required to peevishly beg for it, which he finds humiliating.

This eternal, reflexive humiliation leaves him angry much of the time, performing a lonely dance of brittle perfection. The only time he feels intimately connected to this woman he has bound himself to is when he is vindicating her honor by cutting off the head of an old friend she now insists is a deadly enemy. They are never closer than when he is manfully serving her need for revenge. For me, even the spottiest intermittent empathy beats that irresolvable fucking tragedy every day of the week.

Emergency Powers under the Führerprinzip

The Hitlerian behavior just doesn’t stop with these dangerous, angry morons. Trump’s enraged little Jewish Josef Goebbels, Stephen Miller, during the El Salvador dictator’s staged visit yesterday, announced in the Oval Office that “the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 … in our favor” and that “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously.”

In non-MAGA world, the Supreme Court actually ruled 9-0 that the unlawfully kidnapped, rendered and indefinitely detained Abrego Garcia, must be brought back to the US to be heard, as due process requires under our constitution. Miller flat out lied, claiming the exact opposite of what the 9-0 Supreme Court ruled in their shadow docket decision. Tens of millions of credulous low-information Americans will hear Miller’s lie and believe him, because, if a man who the president trusts that much said it, it must be true. People are saying it’s true, in ways nobody has ever seen before. Unless you’ve ever read a history of the Third Reich.

It is amazing to me, and horrifying, that Trump manages to hit every single one of Hitler’s notes in this incoherent, atonal aria he is constantly improvising. When Hitler was trying out mass murder for the German people, it was Germans in mental wards he executed. These people, incurably insane, severely disabled, physically or mentally, were, according to the Führer, “useless eaters” who only consumed food healthy German warriors needed, and took shits. These useless eaters were living “lives unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben). They were unproductive, a drag on Germany’s greatness and it was a mercy to euthanize them, according to the greatest living German genius and the embodiment of the soul of Germany, at that time, Adolf Hitler.

Today, as reported by Heather Cox Richardson, it turns out Trump has plans for this same kind of person, born without a multimillion dollar inheritance — the unproductive ones. There is nothing this demented, psychopathic motherfucker is doing or saying, or having his loyal sychophants say, that is not straight out of Herr Hitler’s foul mouth. Here’s a nice bit of improv from the once and future American Leader, as Charles Koch’s network was maneuvering the justice-evading serial felon back into power, backed by the might of a billionaire funded army of true believers in American oligarchic fascism:

[Trump] continued [talking to Musk on X in 2024 about foreign leaders kicking people out of their countries to migrate in caravans to the US]: “The fact is, it’s brilliant for them because they’re taking all of their bad people, really bad people and—I hate to say this—the reason the numbers are much bigger than you would think is they’re also taking their nonproductive people. Now these aren’t people that will kill you…but these are people that are nonproductive. They are just not productive, I mean, for whatever reason. They’re not workers or they don’t want to work, or whatever, and these countries are getting rid of nonproductive people in the caravans…and they’re also getting rid of their murderers and their drug dealers and the people that are really brutal people….”

It will not stop with an innocent immigrant living legally and productively (he’s a working member of an American labor union) in Maryland who is jammed into a car by masked ICE agents and illegally disappeared into a foreign dictator’s notorious mega-prison for “terrorists.” As I mentioned yesterday, call someone a “terrorist” and you are halfway to convincing millions that the guy deserves whatever he gets. Torture is too good for Abrego Garcia, say a million ignorant voices, ten million. If a person commits a crime, they are arrested and prosecuted, and if found guilty by a jury, sentenced to some kind of punishment. If an insane dotard can declare that an innocent person, charged with no crime and rendered due to “administrative error” to an infamous prison, for indefinite detention, and refuse to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court decision stating that the rendered man must be returned to the US for a hearing, then we have our American Hitler. As stupid, vain and psychopathic as the original. And obeyed by his ambitious, loyal, ass-licking cultists, to the end.

You say he wants to be a dictator like it’s a bad thing…

The last time a US president endorsed crossing over to the “dark side” to torture terrorism suspects, during Dick Cheney’s time in office, we sent these poor devils (most of them not even charged with any crime) to secret dark sites to be tortured. Calling someone a terrorist is like calling them a pedophile, when someone is accused of either of those things many people recoil at the accusation and don’t really care about proof or what is done to them. To be fair, Obama also ordered the execution, by drone, of an American citizen who’d fled to Yemen, and, several days later, the “accidental” killing of his teenaged son. Neither American was charged with any crime, though they were tried in the agitated court of public opinion and Obama’s spokesmen were despicably coy at press conferences when asked about the extrajudicial killings.

Now we have an administration as close to Hitler’s as possible, modeled on the Führer’s government by American fascist thought leaders on the cusp of realizing lifelong dreams of unlimited power. Personal loyalty to the Leader is seemingly the only qualification for a cabinet position, or any government job, actually. The military has been purged of all generals and other leaders who will not take this oath to a man, rather than to the rule of law; an unqualified, but fiercely loyal, seeming idiot put in charge of the Department of Defense. Inspectors general have been illegally removed across government agencies so there is no oversight of waste, corruption or abuse. Unqualified wealthy donors with glaring conflicts of interest and stunning lack of expertise have been confirmed for cabinet positions on straight party line votes by a supine, razor thin MAGA majority in Congress. Here’s one better, the unvetted racist madman ultra mega-megadonor/government contractor who heads a phantom agency charged with cutting enough money from government to fund generous new tax breaks for the super-wealthy. An actual Nazi.

Now America’s strongman is defying the Supreme Court whose 6-3 radical right judicial fraternity majority he appointed half of. In a 9-0 shadow docket opinion they gave the district judge, whose ruling they affirmed — the man illegally rendered to El Salvador must be returned to the US — a warning about showing respect and deference to the president who appointed a third of them. With this warning about the district court judge’s need to show “deference” in hand, Trump’s DOJ is telling the lower court judge, whose ruling was affirmed 9-0, to go fuck herself.

Here is a succinct account of why Abrego Garcia is in a supermax El Salvador prison for terrorists and the consequences, for the rest of us, of a Hitler wannabe telling a federal judge, acting in accordance with a ruling of the Federalist Society Six (joined by the constitution obeying minority), to fuck off.

When Dick Cheney had terrorism suspects grabbed at airports, off the street, he did so secretly. He sent them to secret torture sites in Poland, Egypt, Asia, places we will never know about. The “genius” of Trump is that he commits his crimes in public, brazenly, secure in his knowledge that millions of angry, screwed Americans love that he does all his violence publicly, without the need to pander to public opinion. It helps that Trump is a psychopath, because he feels neither empathy nor regret. He does not hesitate to throw even his most loyal sycophants into the meat grinder, if it is ever to his advantage. It is always to his advantage to cause pain to someone, it is the only way he can feel whole.

Our hope at the moment resides in us, all of us. Trump’s larger plan is to keep turning up the heat, economically, culturally, politically, and by illegally deporting innocent people to indefinite imprisonment in foreign dictatorships, without a whiff of due process of law, then telling the courts to fuck off, until there is a massive protest he can turn violent as a pretext for invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act. His April 20th [1] wet dream is martial law that will allow his fully loyal military to turn their guns on disloyal American citizens, particularly colored, gay, progressive, justice-minded ones. That’s the dream of every fascist, rule by terror and death to all terrorists, and pedophiles, as well as opposition leaders, dissenters, protesters, intellectuals, readers of banned books, providers of abortions to raped girls, etc. Their right to treat others as they see fit, kidnap, torture, send to a gulag, or privatized concentration camp, to defenestrate, poison or strangle them, is essential to their power and control, the only things that make a “strongman” feel safe.

Trump’s role model, Vladimir Putin, had the man who oversaw the archive of Soviet War Crimes during World War Two arrested on charges that he was a pedophile who had raped his own daughter. The man was imprisoned, the trial delayed, the Soviet War Crimes archive shut down, the records presumably destroyed (the better to rewrite history on the eve of an invasion of Ukraine with war crimes as a major strategic plan). In the end, even in Putin’s Russia, the man charged with pedophilia was found innocent of the charges. In the end, Putin got what he needed, the purge of archives documenting the same crimes his army was committing in Ukraine. Making MAGA great again!

[1] Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. His 50th birthday in 1939 was celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany, featuring grand parades and lavish festivities. Trump plans the same celebration, complete with military parades, for his 79th birthday in two months. Remember, he’s a young 79, two and a half, to be precise.

American privatized concentration camps for migrants (and others), coming right up

Allison McCann, Alexandra Berzon, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported today that the administration also intends to spend as much as $45 billion over the next two years on new detention facilities for immigrants. In the last fiscal year, the total amount of federal money allocated to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement was about $3.4 billion. The new facilities will be in private hands and will operate with lower standards and less oversight than current detention facilities.

source

Nazis will be Nazis, after all.

Trump pardons a corporate “person”, a fellow psychopath

Breaking news: since John Roberts and the Federalist Five ruled that no presidential pardon can ever be questioned in a court of law, Donald Trump gave the first ever presidential pardon to a corporation. Some bitcoin outfit incorporated in the Seychelles that had some trouble with authorities over shady dealings, money laundering, trifles. They got an absolute, blanket presidential pardon. Even if Trump committed a crime in granting the pardon (say he was paid $50M for the pardon by these bitcoin bros), pardons are part of his core presidential powers, so — absolute immunity, even if he took a $50,000,000 bribe to grant the unappealable pardon. Suck on it, cucks.

Meantime, a few words about the modern, American global corporation. I’m thinking about corporate medicine since a recent run in with a urological corporation, the biggest in the USA, apparently, whose top local branch biller shanked me in the urethra with a rusty ice pick a few weeks ago:

You can’t avoid the word psychopath to describe the corporate person. A psychopath cannot feel empathy or regret and acts only in his own self-interest. Very few psychopaths are serial killers like the ones we see on TV. Most are charming, determined, ambitious, highly intelligent, strategic, great salesmen, fearless entrepreneurs, CEOs, top surgeons, pundits and the highly focused leaders of many professions. James Fallon, affable neuroscientist and expert in the psychopath’s brain, who discovered he was a psychopath at the age of sixty, lays out the entire constellation of psychopathic traits. The thing that convinced him he was a psychopath, after the familiar PET scan of that distinct brain and the unanimous answers of all of the people in his life indicating that he was indeed a psychopath, was that he truly didn’t care about the conclusive diagnosis.

In order to understand the nature of corporate medicine, it’s necessary to grasp the essential personality of the Supreme Court-created “person” that is the modern corporation. The case for the psychopathy of corporations is made beautifully in a 2003 documentary called The Corporation, (now available for free on youTube, highly recommended). Corporations possess all the attributes of psychopathic serial killers. These traits, as outlined by an FBI profiler of serial killers, are: callous unconcern for the feelings of others; incapacity to maintain enduring relationships; reckless disregard for the safety of others; deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit; incapacity to experience guilt; failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors. It is ridiculous to expect the human representatives of such a “person” to “first do no harm” since the entity they serve cannot feel empathy or regret and has only one concern – maximizing profits. It is better to bill for an unnecessary, painful operation without doing any prior tests, and to hurt the patient, than not to bill at all.

A corporate “person” has only one legal duty, according to the Supreme Court, to maximize shareholder profit. To this end a corporate person, unburdened by empathy or regret, often has a high tolerance for what economists call ‘externalities’, the unfortunate downside outcomes of corporate profit-making activities. The price of settling a class action lawsuit from a community downstream whose children are poisoned by lead, or any toxic bi-product of the corporate product, for example.

The corporate “person” is a complete psychopath. Corporate culture encourages the human embodiment of its essential character to rise to leadership positions. The corporate structure keeps every psychopath working for it free from personal liability for anything. Fair is fair. The corporate personality also explains a lot about the severe, mechanical, sometimes deadly, practices of corporate medicine. The awful truth is that we are currently living in the judicially-approved, psychopathic billionaire-created Age of the Corporation, in other words, the Golden Age of Psychopaths.

As predicted, harsh consequences for candid DOJ lawyer under Bondi’s like, totally unweaponized DOJ

From no less than today’s NY Times:

Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.

The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .

. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.

Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”

A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.

source

In a surprise move, the DOJ is recruiting replacements for DOJ attorneys fired for disloyalty to the president and his agenda from the graduates of “Libertarian” law schools (Antonin Scalia Law School, anyone?) who believe, along with the Federalist Society, the far-right judicial fraternity they join as law students, in the right of the strong (super-wealthy) to do whatever they need to do to the weak (the other 99.5%). A good psychopath will do that.

We are in the hands of psychopaths (and cowards)

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]

The Rule of Law, MAGA style

It is a terrible thing to be a lawyer for a crazed, antisocial serial criminal with no impulse control who is also a compulsive liar. In a court of law, where rules, facts introduced as evidence and actual laws applied to those facts decide the merits of the case, it is difficult to legally defend someone who keeps changing their lying arguments and continually implicates themselves and their accomplices with careless, incriminating public statements. If the criminal defendant is a braggart who cannot stop publicly taking credit for things that are flagrantly illegal, your nightmare as a lawyer gets worse still.

Here in the USA, the Constitution is the source of all law binding the federal government, and through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, every state government as well. No government entity in the United States may deprive a person of life, liberty or property without a notice of its intent to do so and a hearing at which the accused may be heard. This is called due process, the requirement of legal notice and an opportunity to be heard before any punishment is imposed.

The process you are due, as someone in the United States legally (or illegally, for that matter) is — you must be charged with a crime and then given the opportunity to be heard by a judge before you can be imprisoned, fined, have your property seized, be deported, etc.

The president had his myrmidons round up a few hundred seemingly random Hispanics, shave their heads, put them into orange jumpsuits and chains. They then staged a photo op, marching these supposedly dangerous criminals onto a plane to be flown to a notorious penal colony-style prison in El Salvador. They staged a photo op on the other end, of these men deported without due process, or any process at all, actually, being marched off to the overcrowded supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador.

The family of one of these men, Abrego Garcia, a legal resident married to an American citizen, raising an autistic five-old child as well as two kids from his wife’s previous relationship, made an emergency motion in federal court to have him returned to the United States. According to the testimony, Garcia has been, as most poor immigrants are, a model citizen, with protected status here because of credible threats of violence and death by gangs in El Salvador.

You may be familiar with the self-contradicting piece of doggerel offered by the Trump administration in federal court to justify its actions, what I call the Nazi line about this case. Call it the MAGA line if you like, but read a few histories of Mr. Hitler’s Germany and you will see no difference in technique. Garcia was deported due to “administrative error” the administration admits, yet, Trump’s DOJ and all of his spokesmen and surrogates insist Garcia is also a member of the violent MS-13 gang.

Important thing to remember, MAGA arguments, like Nazi arguments, do not need to make any sense in the conventional sense of the word sense. Picture the poor bastard lawyer who’s got to make this ridiculous clerical error/ but still terrorist, argument. He’s got to argue this in front of a judge not disposed to ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to approve clearly illegal actions by a flagrantly lawless government of lackeys serving a vengeful and ignorant madman.

Check out what he is forced to say, this poor bastard Trump DOJ lawyer. When I read this out loud to Seedj she said, “he’s not going to be in that job very long .” I have to give this man props for his candor.

Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”

Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.

“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.”

Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.

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