Trump’s Cruelty After Mass Shootings Shows How Far We’ve Fallen

The awful feelings from this week’s mass shootings and the twin murders of Rob and Michele Reiner come in waves.

The feelings mix despair and frustration for a society that accepts that violence — even loss of life— as an acceptable trade-off for ideological alignment and personal anger.

It happens that our family is from Providence and we both attended Brown, so the television images were unusually familiar. Bondi Beach may be a half world away, but attacks on Jews are not new for us. And like many, we’ve held Reiner in a certain shared respect for his work in film and politics.

Unfortunately, these shootings not so different from violence a year ago on the campus of Florida State University, where our younger daughter teaches in the dance faculty. The Australian anti-semitism matches attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue and calls of hate in the streets and on the internet.

The frustration is that unending mass killings don’t prompt successful gun limitations, that despite’s thoughts and prayers, we refuse to shun hate and its carriers. Indeed, I had not planned to write about these incidents which we are following closely because the shared revulsion is widespread.

What changed that were postings and remarks by Donald Trump, who posted that the blame for the Reiner killings is the Reiners’ Trump Derangement Syndrome.

No Empathy for Non-Loyalists

Somehow this egocentric autocrat whom we have chosen to be the most powerful man in the country is showing us that for him, only those who agree with his politics, who accept his leadership as flawless, are worthy of his otherwise empty  powers of empathy.

Even as Republicans have started speaking out to say Trump’s remarks were both inhumane and cruel, Trump doubled down to add that he did not like Reiner’s politics. For that matter. Trump isn’t exactly in love universities, including Brown. Nor, despite his protestations about antisemitism, Trump’s support for White, Christian nationalism has been a source of serious discomfort for Jews.

There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.

Who besides Trump can’t find empathy for a couple apparently stabbed to death by their own son, as Los Angeles officials have alleged? How devoid of recognizably human feelings is Trump? How is this Trump, Scion of cruelty, a “leader” worth our respect, even apart from any of his policies?

How have we so walked away from “character” and “morality” in leadership to normalize Trump’s public behaviors?

If this is how Trump acts in a situation that just requires a moment of basic human solemnity, why should anyone be surprised about ordering the killing of shipwrecked smuggling survivors, or wrenching children from deportable migrant parents, or insisting that it’s perfectly fine to double and triple health insurance costs?

Students ought to be able to expect to attend classes without fear of mass killers. People should expect to celebrate religious and ethnic rites with worry about snipers. Parents ought not expect to be stabbed to death by their children.

Unless you’re Donald Trump it has nothing to do with one’s political outlook.

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The post It’s Trump’s Derangement appeared first on DCReport.org.

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Ben Cohen over at The Banter wrote a piece about “The F-Word” aka “fascism,” and why it is 100% appropriate to call Trump and his wider movement fascists. The reason he dived into this “controversial” topic is that, for some reason, it’s actually still controversial to apply the proper label to a movement that is openly fascist and quite happy about it.

Here’s what Ben pointed out:

Robert O. Paxton is widely regarded as the pre-eminent historian of fascism in the English-speaking world. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism in 2004, he defined the ideology in the following terms:

Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

This was written over twenty years ago, long before the Trump era in American politics. But Paxton is describing Trumpism to a tee.

You can quibble about whether or not these people are Nazis, but, as I’ve pointed out recently, that won’t be the case much longer. The Nazis are going to take over the party. Soon.

But for now, quibble away. What you cannot quibble about is whether or not they are, in fact, fascists. The Trump regime fits the definition so closely, it’s practically a textbook example.

So why ARE we fighting over this?

Well, to be clear, “we” aren’t. We on the left have been very clear for quite some time that the American right has been moving in this direction for over half a century. Now that they’re exactly where we said they were going, two things are happening:

1. The centuries-long project of protecting racist white men from consequences is working overtime.

2. The decades-long project of the legacy press shitting on the left is having a temper tantrum.

I’ve talked about the centuries-long project a number of times. This is America’s refusal to hold racist white men accountable for the evil they do.

We should have hanged the treasonous “government” of the Confederacy. Instead, we let them go home.

We should have hunted down and killed the entire KKK for the murderous terrorists they were. Instead, we left the South and allowed them to enact a reign of terror for generations.

We should have shot every American found to be working for the Nazi Party. We were willing to put over 100,000 innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, but racist white men working to destroy America? Well…that’s a different story.

The steps of the Capitol should have been red with the blood of violent terrorists on January 6th. Instead, they were allowed to go home, too.

America does not like to hold racist white men accountable for what they do. It’s unseemly. It’s unfair. It’s “un-American.” Accountability is for Those People and the left.

Of course, and I’ve written about this a whole lot as well, those days are over. The right has gone too far to play the “We have to look forward, not back, for the good of the country” card this time. 2029 is going to be a very bad year for the fascists and their collaborators.

Now, the second thing we’re seeing here is the legacy press protecting itself from having to admit something: We on the left were right all along. The Professional Left Podcast talks about this allllll the time. The legacy press has spent decades telling us that we were fucking idiots. Alarmists. Absolutely hysterical. You stupid libs and your “sky is falling” nonsense!

I’ve only been writing about politics for 15 years, and I saw the White Christian Nationalism coming a mile away. Did I have some special insight? Am I smarter than the extremely well-paid Jake Tapper and Chuck fucking Todd and insufferable Chris Cillizza? No.1 I am, however, not deeply invested in saving face by denying what has been right in front of me for my entire career writing about politics like they are.

For the legacy press to admit that, well, yes, the left was right all along, they would have to admit that they, the legacy press, were wrong.

These are the smarmy shits that helped the Bush regime lie us into the Iraq War. Have they apologized for that yet? No.

These are the miserable assholes that savaged Hillary and pushed Trump into the White House. Have they even admitted they were “overzealous,” much less lying through their fucking teeth? No.

These are the same fucksticks who hated Biden because he was booooring and attacked him over the dumbest stuff imaginable while pretending his age was the Greatest Scandal In American History and then immediately forgot that the age and health of the president were important when Trump limped into office and instantly started to die in front of us. Have they apologized for ushering in the age of American Fascism? No.

Of course, they haven’t. The legacy press does not apologize. They rankle at the idea of being held accountable. They speak truth to power, you see. How the fuck DARE you speak truth to them! You’re nothing but a fucking peasant and they’re the mighty legacy press!

So, yeah, that’s why they’re fighting tooth and nail against naming and shaming the American right. Partly because they would rather eat glass than admit we were right all along. But also, once they do admit we were right, they would have to start discussing the source of America’s deep divide and severe dysfunction: The Modern Republican Party and its base of brain-rotted bigots.

More than anything else, this is verboten. We can savage women. We can savage the LGBTQ+ community. We can savage Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the mentally ill, the handicapped, literally any and all groups are open for criticism. But not racist white men indulging their inner fascist, the way teen girls go through an emo phase. They are swaddled in the protective cloth of eternal innocence and victimhood.

But someday soon, that protection will disappear, and the enablers will disappear with it. That’s when real change will come to America, and we will all be the better for it. Even the racist white fascists who will finally be forced to grow the fuck up.

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Sit right down and let your Ol’ Uncle Ogre tell you a story. A story about hubris and shooting yourself in your own dick because you just couldn’t shut the fuck up long enough to get what you wanted.

Once upon a time, the most corrupt and arrogant president in all of American history saw that after just a few months into his second illegitimate term in office, his party was going to be crushed in the midterms. They were going to be crushed SO badly, they would lose control of the House and quite probably the Senate. The House was the bigger problem, though, because Democrats would impeach his flabby ass for a third time.1

That could not be allowed. The first two impeachments were a huge embarrassment. A third one would be intolerable. No one may hold the Emperor president accountable!!

So the corrupt president, who runs his party like a cheap mob boss, ordered the states controlled by his equally corrupt party to redraw their congressional maps to lock in his power and ensure he wouldn’t be impeached, errrrr…lose the midterms.

Several states rushed to obey their mob boss. Texas. North Carolina. Ohio. Missouri.

But then there was Indiana.

Indiana Republicans didn’t really like the idea of mid-cycle redistricting. They already held a gerrymandered majority. Why mess with what was already working?

The mob boss president demanded it anyway and started to threaten Indiana Republicans.

Now, six months ago, that might have worked. The mob boss president seemed unstoppable. His march to total dictatorial power all but assured.

Six months is a looooong time, though. That was then. This is now. The mob boss president doesn’t seem so all-powerful anymore and Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So the mob boss president ratcheted up the threats, calling out Indiana Republicans by name. And then the death threats from the mob boss president’s death cult started to pour in.

Most Republicans buckle under that kind of pressure. See Joni Ernst’s craven decision to vote for drunken rapist Pete Hegseth. But for some reason, Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So…more pressure, more threats. But the mob boss president couldn’t stop being an asshole and deeply offended a critical vote he needed:

This wasn’t going well. So more threats. It kind of worked? The Indiana House voted to appease the mob boss president. But what about the Senate? Lots of pressure was dumped on them.

The result of all the threats of violence and political retribution and primaries?

On Thursday, the Indiana Senate told the mob boss president to go fuck himself. Loudly.

21 out of 40 Republicans told the mob boss president to take a fucking walk.

Hilariously, the threats have been explicitly cited as the reason WHY Indiana Republicans told the mob boss president to fuck off.

Is Indiana uniquely resistant to mob boss tactics? Maybe. Maybe not. They were pushing back on Trump’s plan months ago, long before his precipitous tumble into lame duck territory.

Still, getting slapped down this hard by a completely Republican-dominated state is embarrassing. Remember, it is absolutely critical for a dictator to maintain the illusion of absolute power. Does this look like absolute power to you? Nah.

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The problem for Trump going forward is that this creates a permission structure for other Republicans to refuse the mob boss president’s demands. When he demands red states give the federal government full control over their elections, they are 100% going to refuse. They’ll have to. Ceding control of elections to the federal government is a one-way road. You can’t turn over all of your election infrastructure and then ask for it back because a Democrat is president.

Because that’s the risk they’ll be running. It’d be great if the regime could rig the elections as they do in Russia and Hungary. But what happens if a Democrat has control of that machinery? The risk isn’t that they’ll rig an election. It’s that they WON’T rig it. Free and fair elections are toxic to Republicans, after all.

But it won’t just be elections. There will be other things Trump orders Republicans to do that will benefit Trump and ONLY Trump. Why should state parties go along with that now? It’s clear the mob boss president is losing his power, and, hey, these Republicans will still have jobs to protect after Trump is long gone.

This is how a regime falls. Not always in big mighty strokes, but in little cracks that undermine the entire foundation until there’s nothing left but a sick and tired and dying old man screaming on the front lawn of the White House that all of this belongs to him and no one can take it away!

Maybe they’ll bury him under the wreckage of his stupid ballroom. But who would risk the rotten smell of his bloated corpse?

Anyway, don’t get too rah-rah for Indiana Republicans. They’re still awful people doing awful things, but for today, they stood up to Trump and hurt him in ways that really count. I’ll take it.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 325 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The photo is one of a number from the “personal collection of Jeffrey Epstein” released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today.

Other photographs show sex toys and bondage equipment — including something with a “choking hazard” warning on it — and a murderers’ row of men hanging out with their good buddy, Jeffrey. These men should be shunned, banished from what we used to call polite society and disinvited from any and all honors which might be bestowed upon them such as speaking at a college, attending a wedding, or even being invited to a dinner party.

That’s a photo of Bill Gates at the lower left on the wall of a room in one of Epstein’s homes. His association with Epstein is known to have been a factor in his divorce:

This is a photo of Bill Clinton being way too happy about being in the presence of his friend Jeffrey Epstein and his mistress-pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell. There are countless photos of Donald Trump in exactly this sort of situation, grinning ear to ear, having the time of his life with Epstein. Democrats cannot shrink from this. Anyone who was close enough to Epstein and his circle to have their picture taken with a big smile on his face should not be allowed anywhere near a Democrat running for any office in the land.

Epstein and Alan Dershowitz, who taught law at Harvard for many years. Epstein donated millions to Harvard and is reported to have visited the campus 40 times or more. Harvard donated the money Epstein gave to groups that support sex trafficking victims. They never should have taken his money in the first place.

Epstein and Woody Allen and a woman whose face is, thankfully for her, redacted. Every restaurant in New York should refuse to seat Allen. Every studio in Hollywood should refuse to distribute his films. Every person who sees him on the street should give him the finger and yell “Epstein” at him.

This is Richard Branson having way too much fun with Epstein and another unidentified man somewhere in the Caribbean. Branson is another person who should be denied honors and banished by right-thinking people.

There is no evidence that any of these men engaged in illegal behavior with Epstein, but that is not the question here, and it is certainly not the standard by which they should be judged. Any association with Epstein, privately or socially and especially in public, in front of the world, puts a stain on them that cannot be washed off.

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Sometimes, you don’t need a study to confirm the obvious, but it can certainly help. And a new one published in the journal Pediatrics confirms what should, by now, be astoundingly obvious: That giving children smartphones is bad for them. The study found that children who are given smartphones before the age of 12 wound up with higher rates of insufficient sleep, obesity, and depression than children whose parents waited until they were teenagers to give them phones.

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What struck me about this study, though, wasn’t just the conclusion, which should be clear to anyone who has picked their head up and looked around in the past decade; it was the ways in which it pokes at various strains of growing inequality among the rich and the poor (and relatedly, between those who have lots of education and those who have much less): Not just in educational outcomes, but in basics like getting enough sleep so your brain functions, and getting the kind of physical movement we all need to live in healthy bodies.

As recently as a decade ago, lawmakers and do-gooders and casual observers were worried that a “digital divide” could fuel inequality because poor kids would have less access to tech: Their parents wouldn’t be able to afford a laptop or consistent wifi, and that might set poor kids back and give wealthier ones a bigger leg up. Instead, with the broad proliferation of smartphones in pockets and school-issued laptops in classrooms, something very different has happened: Poorer kids spend more time on screens than wealthier ones, and see worse outcomes as a result.

This starts really, really young. This is purely anecdotal, but I know very few college-educated city-dwelling white-collar-job-working parents who let their babies see screens (with exceptions for, say, FaceTiming Grandma). This shifts as their children turn two or three and might get an airplane iPad or a half-hour of Miss Rachel so the parents can cook dinner, but among the kind of highly-educated parents who read the New Yorker (and their global equivalents), I’ve observed almost none who will, say, hand a one-year-old their iPhone so they can enjoy a distraction-free dinner. These parents are giving their babies wooden blocks and child-development-expert-designed Lovery play kits, enrolling them in music and tutu school and sensory play classes, and shelling out for plastic-free Montessori-inspired preschools and nannies who agree to keep their phones put away in their purses. Outside of these rarified communities, though, it’s a totally different story: Babies holding smartphones in their strollers; toddlers playing interactive iPad games in the middle of restaurants; children who are barely walking but are highly adept at scrolling through YouTube Kids.

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I don’t say this to judge every single parent who hands their kid a screen (just some of them). Sometimes you’ve gotta get dinner on the table or get through a flight; when kids are older and their peers start getting phones, having one becomes not just a luxury but a means of staying socially connected. The “screens are bad for young kids” conversation is still a pretty new one, and the advice has been muddled; for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics long said no screens before 2, but then changed that rule in 2016, basically saying that FaceTiming family members or even playing some educational games alongside parents is ok after 18 months of age. Conversations about kids and screens are also cultural; parents who don’t spend their workdays behind a computer where they can click over to nytimes.com are (ironically) probably less likely to have the water-cooler conversation be about Jonathan Haidt’s latest book or the study that just came out showing that watching a lot of short-form video is correlated with a series of cognitive deficits, including decreased attention span and inhibition. People who get most of their information from TikTok are not hearing the message that they should get themselves and their kids off of TikTok.

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