My first note to Dr. Bandy Lee

This was my first comment to Bandy Lee, a few days earlier. At the end is a link that explains why I think Ryan Reynolds would be a good person for her to contact (assuming he shares our concern with the unthinkable possibility of a violent madman becoming “president” again, against the will of the majority of voters).

What you have to say is so important, so crucial, to protecting our society. I learn something new from every interview you do and every article you publish.

I wish you would have your media team put out 15 to 30 second shorts that could go viral. Take one great point at a time and just present it to the camera. No undecided voter could remain undecided after hearing what you and your colleagues have to say about the clear and present dangerousness of Trump and his myrmidons.

I’ve been thinking you bury the lede when you save this for paragraph two:

At no time has mental fitness in leadership been more important. Yet, at no time have we had a presidential campaign where mental fitness has been a more precarious issue.

Keep up the good work, and please, please, create some short clips that can become memes. This is, sadly, the age of information and public relations we live in. Although it couldn’t be further from our purposes, check out this short for an example of the power of well-wielded social media: https://youtube.com/shorts/cesrZd73sQY?si=26eefs5di6eb3e9X

At another point I suggested this very compelling story I’ve heard from her, which she told in about half a minute:

Your story about the American Psychiatric Association gagging public discussion of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump might make an excellent illustrative short. 

A powerful psychopath feeling under attack, in a position to reward a US government-funded organization with a record allocation and a new $10,000,000 headquarters in DC, who then rewards them for their favor, ably put into effect by no less than the venerated/hated NY Times, gagging all experts by publicly enforcing the association’s own voluntary rule as if it was federal law.  

That story of the “inviolable” Goldwater Rule, and its always clear political intent, and how it was used to silence the experts to the advantage of the dangerous, powerful psychopath, is too good not to be shared by millions before the election.    

The story of that Trump-facilitated nationwide gag order of professionals acting out of a duty to warn of imminent danger is the perfect illustration of how this malignant type gets away with this open corruption. 

Help Bandy Lee’s message go viral!

Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist who has great, and highly relevant, expertise from years working with violent psychopaths. Feeling that she had a professional duty to warn, based on her observations of newly elected President trump, she convened a 2017 conference on the Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Lee and twenty-six highly respected colleagues, including Robert J. Lifton (author of, among other works, “The Nazi Doctors”) published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, NY Times best-seller and invaluable primer on malignant narcissism. I recommend that book to everyone.

Trump’s allies were able to marginalize the indispensable guide to Trump’s pathology and largely remove it from public discussion. The conservative American Psychiatric Association, ably aided by the powerful NY Times, attacked and vilified the book as a clear violation of the APA’s Goldwater Rule.

That rule (binding only on members of the APA, but treated as an inviolable federal law) states that, no matter what public evidence exists, psychiatrists are forbidden from offering their informed opinions about any public person they have not personally interviewed — and may publicly draw psychiatric conclusions only if the person in question authorizes it.

In other words, the Goldwater Rule states that, if an angry psychopath in a position of public power is cool with public discussion of their rage and unslakable thirst for revenge, after personally consulting with a shrink, only then may the psychiatrist publicly speak about it.

Bandy Lee is brilliant, courageous, articulate and she has a CRUCIAL message that would wake up millions of undecided voters, if they were exposed to it. She has assembled great experts, and recently held a second conference on trump’s dangerous unfitness at the National Press Club [1]. What she has not been able to do is disseminate her message widely, in a way succinct enough for the average distracted, traumatized, non-intellectual American voter to digest, or even encounter.

Bandy Lee’s website is http://www.bandylee.com. Her Substack newsletter is at https://bandyxlee.substack.com/. You can read her detailed assessments and hear long form interviews at those sites, along with a video of the full recent conference. Sadly, you will never encounter her CRUCIAL information in a short, shareable form that could (and should, and MUST) go viral.

I URGE ANYONE READING THIS to put on your thinking cap and find a way to recruit a Ryan Reynolds, or some other genius of social media manipulation, for help getting Bandy Lee’s crucial message out to millions, particularly as it could well be the deciding factor for the “undecided” voters out there.

As I wrote to her on Substack:

Corporations (including a democratic forum like Substack) control most communication in the US, one way or the other.  There are only two ways to influence mass public opinion, both engines for disseminating persuasive information/content, true or false, are problematic.  

The corporate mass media news and editorial narrative leaves out context, engages in false equivalencies, allows lies to air unchecked, consents in the destruction of norms, normalizes pathology, etc.  Profit-driven mass media, whose only motive is financial gain, exerts tremendous influence on most Americans, particularly older voters.

“Social Media”, odious and divisive as it also is, is a powerful driver of public opinion, for better and for worse.  A meme is born when it hits quick, memorably makes a good point, and makes people want to share it.  Billions of shares of a video featuring a memorable dance to a song called Gangnam Style.

I don’t know how to use social media myself, as I’ve learned again recently trying to get answers for why trump appointees Louis DeJoy (slow the mail, cut costs) and Joseph Caffari (Homeland Security IG who, uh, accidentally let all January 6 secret service evidence be irretrievably destroyed) are still in positions of power, but there are geniuses in the field of internet marketing with expertise in how to create viral short videos.  Talk to the folks at Meidas Touch about how to make important, individual points in shareable 30 second bytes.   

Your expert insights need to be set out in short, shareable videos.  If undecided voters are exposed to your message, it’s hard to believe many would vote for trump.   You should be in touch with the Lincoln Project, for example, their take on your main points about Trump’s dangerousness, coming from experts in violent pathology assisted by experts in propaganda, would get wider exposure.  Talk to Anthony Davis about creating some shorts from your interviews with him, I have seen many 30-60 second sections of those talks that would make great shareable shorts.   We need 30 second clips of some of your best points, points that can instantly be shared. Millions of people need to hear them!

Your best-selling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an indispensable primer for understanding the personality type capable of pathological violence.  That we have a presidential candidate for a major political party possessing all the clear warning signs of destructive rage, on steroids, is CRUCIAL for undecided voters to know.  

Trump’s brand is violence, fighting, oppositionality, never admitting fault or defeat.  A classic psychopath.   He’s already fomented criminal violence in his name that he’s promised pardons for, as well as constant threats of, and pardons for, future violence.   His handpicked (by his handlers) Supreme Court majority recently ruled that his pardons may not be questioned or appealed, even if they are offered for sale.

Blah, blah, blah. . . Dr. Lee is busy and I haven’t heard back from her.

On the well-funded extremist right, they always march in lockstep, speaking in one voice, defiantly repeating the same disproven lies over and over until they wear people out. On the non-fascistic side of the spectrum there are a million voices, ten million shades of nuance, and those diverse and personal messages have neither the persistence nor the compelling public force of a unified, infuriating talking point grunted over and over and over and endlessly amplified by mass media.

Bandy Lee correctly diagnoses the danger we face right now — Trumpism is a public health emergency, like the recent pandemic. Trump contagion (which, to be fair, emanates as much from Charles Koch, Leonard Leo, John Roberts and their filthy ilk as from their current performative avatar, the Orange Polyp, himself) has made millions admire and imitate his lowest impulses, impulses he cannot control. This way lies rage, more and more violence and eventually mass murder, guaranteed.

Want a nice factoid? In 2014 there were 912 antisemitic incidents in the United States, a number that has gone up every year since Trump’s (oops, trump’s) 2016 election — last year there were 8,873 reported antisemitic incidents [2]. I would assume all hate crimes in the US have increased in similar numbers, remember the violent aftermath of trump’s witty, peaceful Kung Flu call to violence?

You want to argue about whether Trump is dangerously, violently insane, an American Hitler or not? Put him in back power, surrounded by loyal MAGA appointees, wait a couple of years and — guaranteed, I’ll meet you in a death camp somewhere (if we’re lucky, that is). It took the actual Hitler twenty full years, from his violent attempted coup, to the opening of the first true Nazi death camps. All these creatures need is time.

[1] Bandy Lee, earlier today:

The theme of our conference was that fitness is not a subjective, partisan, or even political “opinion” but a scientific finding based on extensive research, clinical experience, and uniform application of medical standards to military officers, officers handling nuclear weapons, surgeons, and executive officials.  The consensus at the conference was that mental fitness is critically important for the U.S. presidency and that Donald Trump is decisively unfit.  It should become widely known that Trump’s mental unfitness has now been objectively measured in multiple ways; that mental health expertise is critical to explaining what he is and is not capable of doing; how dangerous it is to have a mentally unfit person in a position of power; and how his psychological dangers can quickly spread into social, cultural, and geopolitical dangers, by rendering domestic legal and political institutions, and global balances and alliances ineffectual.

source

[2] Reporter Bob Garfield, in a particularly brilliant post, includes this:

The preemptive blame, of course, is meant to both intimidate Jewish voters and rally the violent among MAGA faithful, such as the ones who attacked the Capitol over his 2020 “stolen election” lies, such as the “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” such as the mass murderers who shot six Jews to death at a deli in Jersey City, NJ, such as Robert Bowers, guilty of gunning down worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, such as the perpetrators of 8873 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year alone (in 2014, the year before Trump’s first presidential campaign, there were 912, and the number has risen every year since), such as the Proud Boys, Goyim Defense League, Blood Tribe, Ku Klux Klan, QAnon, Black Hebrew Israelites, Atomwaffen Division and other hate groups.

source

A few thoughts for 5785

This is from a happy new year email to my cousin who lives on a moshav in Israel, not far from Jerusalem.

Your assessment of Jewish values and the reality of living in an antisemitic world was very good.  If only the values you rightly attribute to us were practiced by all Jews.   It is a trap, like antisemitism, to believe that just because someone is in your tribe they are motivated by only the best of the tribe’s moral code.  The bulk of humans are somewhere in the middle, with the best and worst being small minorities of any group (although the worst have the biggest influence, it often seems). 

I have experienced a Jewish lynch mob, composed of my dearest old friends, all good people and fine Jews, all of whom now consider me dead and have cut off their adult children from me as well, and I have to say, there is nothing more horrific.  To have a rabbi friend (who merely held a torch and remained tactfully silent during the lynching) tell me, when I asked him under what circumstances is it permissible for one Jew to angrily tell another who comes to make amends during the ten days of repentance to buzz off (as my closest friend had), that only HaShem [God] is allowed to do that — the idiotic, blasphemous icing on a disgusting cake.

The mark of a good person is treating other people fairly. No group has any monopoly on this excellent trait.

I just wrote a chapter about the difficulty of learning lessons you don’t want to learn, such as that your closest friends will abandon you en masse when a charismatic member of the group spreads a vicious lie about you (in my case that I am a sadistic, unrepentant torturer who tries to bend others to my will and is totally incapable of love or forgiveness). I certainly didn’t want to learn what I learned about my only sister, about most of my closest friends.  I resisted learning it for decades, believing in the undefeatable power of goodwill, humor, kindness, patience, extending the benefit of the doubt, until the power of those things was eventually defeated by a determined will never to be wrong, at any cost.

I’ve been forced to learn (much against my will) that there is a personality type who can never be wrong, no matter what, who will fight to the death if made to feel insecure, and if they are able to, will always exact fatal revenge for defiance of their will (this can be almost anything, this type is very thin-skinned).  Trump is an example that comes readily to mind.  

I had to finally understand that this also, tragically, defines my sister’s worldview.   My sins against her can apparently never be tallied and so she’s been required to lie to her children a few times to protect herself from the existential threat I pose to her and to them.  It’s awful, it’s terrible, it’s like antisemitism — reason, fact, cause and effect, love, kindness, patience, giving the benefit of the doubt, appeals for empathy — poof!  A desperately held belief may never be changed in this personality type (and others loyal to this type) it seems.

Debunking just one MAGA lie

As MAGA prepares to once again fight like hell (or they won’t have a country anymore) their lawyers have filed dozens of election challenge cases already [1]. As their ilk does for every other lost cause or lie, they have a simple (if false) answer about all those court cases they lost last time:

All MAGA election-related cases were dismissed not on the merits, but on procedural grounds, like lack of standing.

Even if this were true — it is not — lack of standing is a fatal flaw in a lawsuit, as is failure to state a legally coherent complaint (supported by evidence). In order to win a case a party must have standing — an actual provable injury the court can address — in order to proceed.

The scumbag Attorney General of Texas brought a case to the Supreme Court, signed on to by legal eagle MAGA Mike Johnson and more than a hundred MAGA legislators, seeking to overturn voting results in several states Trump lost in 2020. Even the MAGA Six had to acknowledge that Texas had no standing to bring this case limiting what other states could do. Nor did any of the loyal legislators, led by MAGA Mike Johnson, who signed on to the law suit to do their master’s bidding, have even the remotest theory of standing to act as “friends of the court”.

It is easy to forget the hundred plus lawsuits the RNC and Trump brought prior to the 2020 election, to try to suppress voting by Democrats. Take the sickening, desperate case of Trump v. Boockvar in Pennsylvania. In that case Trump 2020 and the RNC cited purely speculative harms they might have suffered if absentee voting was allowed to take place as planned during the peak of the pandemic. They laid out for the court the specter of theoretical, massive fraud never remotely seen in US elections.

They submitted no evidence to support their claim (there was none), yet the judge, a Trump appointee from the Federalist Society list, did not dismiss the case. He ordered them to produce evidence. They produced a big box of printouts and screen shots from Fox, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, Die Volkischer Beobachter, The New York Post, OANN, “evidence” the judge eventually detailed and dismissed. I followed the case on the electronic docket, one of more than 100 frivolous cases the litigious fucks filed before the 2020 election. Nobody was reporting on these cases and it was aggravating to me at the time.

In the end, I was relieved that the young federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, not only dismissed the case in the end, but took an additional hundred pages to make his dismissal appeal proof. You can read about his dismissal of the case here.

It’s always war to the death with Nazi fucks like these. The SS continued fighting to the death while Hitler was in the bunker, raging and getting ready to shoot his beloved German Shepard. Let’s hope today’s fight to the death continues to remain more figurative than literal and that more Ranjan-like holdings are written by defenders of our constitutional democracy.

perfect shot ear, perfect!

[1]

The R.N.C. is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Mr. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Ms. Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Mr. Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been criminally charged.

Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the R.N.C.’s election integrity team. Ms. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.

“I’m kind of holding my breath for that,” she said on a recent podcast. “I think we’re in probably, at least litigation-wise, as good of a place as we can be before the election.”

(NYT link above)

Brave stance by the Grey Lady!

Arguably, this NY Times editorial board piece savaging Trump’s unfitness for office, in the words of those who know him best (Bill Barr, Betsy DeVos, Sean Spicer, Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and company), does not square with A.G. Sulzberger, the 44 year-old CEO of the family business’s idiotic formulation that “politics” and “objective reporting” do not mix, but it’s something, I suppose.

The Dangers of Donald Trump from those who know him

Here’s what Sulzberger, whose father passed the CEO crown to him a few years back, had to say about the insurmountable difficulty of a free press reporting honestly on “politics”:

In a recent guest essay for the rival Washington Post, Times CEO A.G. Sulzberger exemplified this stubborn tendency. After acknowledging the danger Trump poses to the nation and the media itself, Sulzberger straw-manned his critics with the following caricature. “As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics,” he wrote. “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”

[I wasn’t able to find where I originally clipped this from, most likely suspects Heather Cox Richardson or Allison Gil)

AG Sulzberger strongly disagrees with those who “suggest” an enraged, incurious maniac like Trump is intent on suppressing all dissent, including the independent press, even if Trump himself is the one “suggesting it” (when he’s back in power he’ll pull the license of those commies at NBC after he won the rigged debate and they kept calling him a liar).

All I can really say to this strawman punching, issue obfuscating, 200 front page articles calling Biden’s cognitive abilities into question publishing, “foundational importance of journalistic independence” spouting CEO gasbag, and his September 5 op ed in the Washington Post is, go take a flying fuck at a rolling, apolitical, donut, bro.

Broken Souls

The world is full of broken souls. Some souls are broken early, by cruel or neglectful caretakers. If you are a baby who does not get comforted, or fed, regularly, your tiny soul will get a few deep cracks, always there as you grow. Others are broken later by life itself, injury, sickness, disability, bad luck, death of a particular loved one, abuse, meeting the wrong person at the wrong time and things going badly, and then the depressing pattern repeating.

We are all broken in some way, at least everyone I’ve ever met. The popular goal of achieving a state of permanent happiness appears to be an illusion. Can we remain happy when we read the latest accounts of babies killed, women and girls raped at gunpoint, explosions killing random innocent people in the name of one god or another, popular politicians angrily promising retribution and a return to the good old days of vast concentration camps for all enemies? Chasing after the abstraction of happiness, like the single-minded pursuit of “success” or wealth, is a kind of myopic idiocy, it seems to me. As my ex’s guru put it so poetically: chasing happiness is like a deer who runs after a mirage of water and dies of thirst. Well said, Babaji.

We love others in spite of their brokenness. We help each other heal a bit, by the application of a steady, empathetic love we all need. Every human being has a need for this healing connection to others, being given the benefit of the doubt and treated with kindness. Too many of us live without it, or even the hope for it. This precious love can be perverted, it turns out, when desperate souls place it on a scale against loyalty, righteous grievance and an appeal to harsh judgment and anger. It is a complicated business, being a decent, loving human being.

I think of my cousin Eli, my father’s first cousin. He was a very loving man, though he was rough, volatile, prone to fits of rage, capable of violence, estranged from his children, filled with hatred at times. I say he was very loving because he always showed that side, with warmth and humor, to me and to my mother before me. Both my mother and I fought with him regularly, vehemently sometimes, and in the end we always smiled, kissed and hugged and looked forward to our next battle. It was the complete recovery from our conflict, every time, no matter how fierce the fight had just been, that continually proved our love for each other.

You can look at a guy like Eli, conclude he’s dangerously nuts, give him a wide berth and have only the most polite and superficial interactions with him. Or you can see part of yourself reflected in him, a need to be heard, to have a strong opinion, to duke it out whenever you feel unfairly challenged, and above all, a need for reconciliation and reassurances of love. There was nothing false about my mother’s love for Eli or his love for her. They would each do anything for each other. But accept something from the other that struck them as bullshit? Why would they do that?

So in spite of our brokenness, we can form strong bonds, find love, set boundaries, overlook terrible faults in another because we also feel the steadiness of their love. Love is a stronger thing than happiness, which changes according to circumstances. We may get angry at someone we love, but the love remains. If it can be destroyed by a single conflict, eradicated by unyielding anger, it was not very sturdy, healthy love to begin with. It was the best our broken self was capable of finding at the time we first felt love toward that person.

As we grow, ideally we learn more about ourselves and the reasonable limits of our tolerance for the brokenness of those around us. Those who can’t acknowledge their own pain are the most dangerous motherfuckers on the planet. No amount of love can save someone who is hellbent on never being wrong, always being some childish notion of “perfect”. Can you imagine a love that can truly help a poor devil like that?

Truth vs. self-preservation

There are times when an insistence on telling the truth will cost you your head. Honesty is not always welcome, and we all know when it is best to smudge the truth a bit. A friend serves you a culinary creation that is not tasty, you compliment the consistency of the crust, smile as you point out how beautifully the greasy contents reflect a rainbow of light. You try your best to keep that look off your face as you pretend to enjoy the nasty dish, while looking for the dog to furtively offload it to.

In contrast to little lies to spare the feelings of people we care about, there are times when swallowing the truth you need to tell is like sucking down poison. If you can’t be honest with a friend, when it really counts, that person is not actually your friend. Sometimes a hideous choice will be presented to you by someone with a firm resistance to an unpleasant truth. I had a poisonous condition placed on me if I wanted to preserve my lost friendship with a group of lifelong friends, after a conflict with two friends raged in spite of all my attempts to make peace. I was told I had to admit that I was a sick, vindictive, torturing, unforgiving, venomous piece of shit who was totally to blame for all the bad feelings in this little group of old friends. Maybe then I could be forgiven for being unforgiving.

Accept responsibility for an insane conflict I hadn’t even caused?  No can do.  I found myself mostly able to refrain from sinking to their level of unreasoned anger — not to mention their uncritical embrace of a grossly counter-factual account of a simple conflict — but being called toxic (in a text) for simply being honest about a series of easy to understand events that actually took place, literally made me spit.  I was spitting out the toxin of being mercilessly treated by people I had long loved and trusted.

Gabor Maté points out that the two strongest human needs are for attachment and authenticity. Attachment comes first, as helpless babies we need to be cared for by our caretakers and, because our life literally depends on it, early on we learn to smile, cuddle, do endearing things so that our parents will become attached to us and protect us. Authenticity is the need, once we become conscious individuals, to express ourselves, have our feelings taken seriously, our needs and wants respected. These two primal human needs are often at odds and sometimes, although we shouldn’t be, in a better world than this, we will be forced to choose one or the other.

A parent starts off enchanted by their baby’s seeming adoration and complete need for them.   Conflicts arise in any parenting situation and the terrain can begin to change.  It is crucial to some parents to keep their child subservient to the parents’ needs.   Then the lifelong cycle begins — the child must always navigate the narrow, treacherous terrain between honesty and flattery, authenticity and fear of abandonment.   There are many weapons deployed in this ongoing, uneven struggle for supremacy, among parents wired this way by their own fucked up childhoods.

A parent who was traumatically shamed and humiliated as a child will always fear their child’s authenticity. Imagine a more horrifying situation for a parent than the possibility of being shamed and humiliated by their own child. If there is a conflict, this kind of parent must set the entire blame on the kid, there is no real choice for them. To admit weakness, or being wrong, or being fallible, are all direct invitations to a nightmare of shame and humiliation. It’s the goddamn baby who’s the asshole, not me!

It seems comical to state it that way, but otherwise intelligent, educated, sophisticated parents may believe that formulation to the end. I was a good parent, how it is my fault my child was born angry, contrary, needy, stubborn, vindictive? My own very smart parents, to the end of their eighty year lives, both insisted I was born hostile, senselessly fighting them about everything from the day I was born.

“One day old?” I’d ask them.

“As soon as you opened your eyes you glared at us with hostility, you challenged us. I was aware of your judgment and anger toward me from the day you came back from the hospital,” my father always insisted, and my mother would nod along, often citing an idiot pediatrician who confirmed I was having a precocious temper tantrum for absolutely no reason.

“Oh, wow. I guess I don’t remember that. No wonder you always treated me as a dangerous enemy.”

“Now you’re trying to be cute.”

“I never attempt the truly impossible.”

And around it went.

With tyrants there is always a foundational lie that must be accepted as beyond question, an article of faith that must always be pledged to. If there is no evidence to support the lie, and a mountain of evidence that it is a lie, it is that much more important that everyone publicly insist the lie is true and the so-called truth, devastating to the leader’s cause and credibility, is pure, evil, godless, pedophile commie bullshit. This clinging to the truth of demonstrable lies is a consistent tic with those who can never be wrong. If the truth is harmful, create a truth that is invincible.

Be true to yourself, painful as that may sometimes be. It will rarely come down to having your head literally cut off. I am living proof of that (so far).

To fanatically faithful supporters, this is drivel

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

On Sunday, a bipartisan group of 741 national security leaders—some of the biggest names in the field—endorsed Harris. “To the American People,” they wrote. “We are former public servants who swore an oath to the Constitution. Many of us risked our lives for it. We are retired generals, admirals, senior noncommissioned officers, ambassadors, and senior civilian national security leaders. We are Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. We are loyal to the ideals of our nation—like freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—not to any one individual or party.

“We do not agree on everything, but we all adhere to two fundamental principles. First, we believe America’s national security requires a serious and capable Commander-in-Chief. Second, we believe American democracy is invaluable. Each generation has a responsibility to defend it. That is why we, the undersigned, proudly endorse Kamala Harris to be the next President of the United States.

“This election is a choice between serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness. It is a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them.

“We do not make such an assessment lightly. We are trained to make sober, rational decisions. That is how we know Vice President Harris would make an excellent Commander-in-Chief, while Mr. Trump has proven he is not up to the job.”

source

Traumatically low self-esteem

As psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent years working with violent prison inmates, observed: all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem. It is an illuminating and important insight.

How does a child turn into a violent sadist? By being traumatized at the hands of those they relied on, beyond the ability to trust anyone, beyond hope of self-esteem. They internalize this hopeless, isolated, humiliation and must inflict violence on others to get a twinge of what feels to them like self-esteem. The suffering and helplessness of their crushed victims confirms for them that they are powerful after all, to be respected, and feared.

In one sense this seems obvious, after years watching the nonstop sickening performance of a thin-skinned, whining “strongman” who controls one of our two major political parties, banished all critics and bent it to his perverted will. He perceives violence carried out in his name as love, as he observed on January 6 when the “patriotic” mob of political martyrs were forced, by a massive bipartisan cabal of his cheating enemies, to attack Capitol police. He’d never seen so much love, he tweeted, as when his people were passionately injuring dozens of cops in his name.

It is true of any narcissist who is far enough on the scale to behave psychopathically. They literally cannot help what they do, though that’s no excuse for their predictably treacherous behavior. They are compelled by a desperation someone not traumatized to the extent they are can ever fully comprehend.

These creatures need to feel the power of hurting others, otherwise they feel utterly worthless. The humiliating feeling of being undeserving of love motivates monstrous behavior. The attempt to gain self-respect, respect and love by dominance, fear and manipulation is, as Gilligan points out, a misguided attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

I point this out because knowing this basic mechanism of all abusers is important, if you are faced with one of these supremely destructive assholes. Once you see abusiveness in your personal life, say nothing (appeals to empathy or fairness are futile with these assholes) but put maximum emotional distance between yourself and one of these hopeless, reflexively harmful humanoids.