Category: Political issues

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The media malpractice this morning is shocking. Yesterday the entire Congress voted almost unanimously to release the Epstein files. There is no way that such an event won’t end up as a major moment in American history. And yet, the New York Times’ web site this morning has the story way down below the middle of the page, with a small headline. Not only that, but the story is completely cowardly, all about politics in Congress without a word about what this means for the Trump presidency. The Times’ lousy, cowardly columnists, at least as of 7:30 a.m., were silent.

As usual these days, we have to look somewhere else for any helpful analysis. Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack post this morning was one of her history lessons, about Gettysburg. I had to do some digging around to discover that she posted a video late yesterday, before the Senate made its move. She pretty much covers what can confidently be said at this point.

I am a person who reads for information. It annoys the daylights out of me that the trends these days are more and more toward video. I detest video as a source of information. It moves too slowly. It can’t be quickly scanned for whether it contains anything relevant, the way text can be. Don’t people read anymore? It’s possible to download YouTube videos (with some special software), isolate the audio with an app such as VLC, then generate a transcript from the audio with an app such as MacWhisper — an awkward and time-consuming process. But at least it’s possible.

Anyway, in the video, Richardson discusses the question of whether it would be possible for Trump and his appointees to suppress or strip the Epstein files, if they actually are delivered. Her bottom line is that it would not be easy, because so many people know what’s in the files and because a unanimous Congress seems to be in no mood to tolerate any funny business. There probably are few people willing to be part of a cover-up for a president who is guilty as sin, who is weaker by the day, and who just might go down because of what is in the files. They can gamble on a Trump pardon, but now they know that a unified Congress (on the matter of the Epstein files, anyway) will subpoena as many people as necessary if there are any signs that the Epstein files have been tampered with.

I keep hoping that something of major importance happened yesterday. And yet Trump has slithered away from the law and the facts time and time again. Richardson says in the video that whatever happens, it’s going to take time. How sick are we of being patient for the spectacle of Donald J. Trump utterly destroyed, because of his own crimes?

Epstein aside, MAGA political calculus clearly is changing. Once the members of Congress calculate that Trump is more likely to cost them votes than to gain them votes, it will be every scumbag Republican for himself, every one of them. They don’t care whether Trump is a pervert and rapist. They’ve known that all along. All they cared about was riding the Trump wave — as long as that wave carried them up rather than down.

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Update:

It took a while, but I transcribed the audio from the Heather Cox Richardson’s video (above) and asked ChatGPT to summarize it. Here are the results.

Summary of Heather Cox Richardson on the Epstein Files Bill

Heather Cox Richardson explains how the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill (427–1) to require the Department of Justice to release the FBI’s Epstein files, and what this reveals about Donald Trump’s weakening grip on the Republican Party and the difficulty of fully burying the Epstein story.

1. What the House just did

Shortly before Richardson went live, the House voted 427–1 to require the DOJ to release FBI files related to Jeffrey Epstein. These are not the same as the roughly 20,000 documents already released from the Epstein estate, which came via subpoena. The new bill targets the FBI’s investigative files, created after renewed scrutiny of Epstein around 2018.

2. How the bill got to the floor: the discharge petition

The key procedural tool was a discharge petition, which forces a vote once it has 218 signatures. After Democrat Adelita Grijalva was sworn in, she added the crucial signature, bringing the petition to 218.

Four Republicans signed the petition:

• Nancy Mace
• Lauren Boebert
• Marjorie Taylor Greene
• Thomas Massie

Trump and his allies put intense pressure on these Republicans to withdraw. They refused. Once a discharge petition is filed, it cannot be withdrawn, so the House was obliged to hold the vote.

3. Trump’s sudden reversal

Initially Trump fought to stop the bill. Then, on Sunday night, he abruptly announced that he didn’t care if the files were released, claiming he had nothing to hide and just wanted to “get it behind us.”

Richardson argues this is clearly tactical rather than sincere:

• Trump has done everything possible to prevent disclosure of these FBI files.
• The previously released estate documents already contain “career-ending” material, and he appears deeply implicated.
• If he fears the FBI files more than the estate files, then those FBI materials are likely even more damaging.

The real reason for his reversal, she suggests, is that he had lost control of House Republicans. With rumors that up to 100 GOP members might back the bill and constituents demanding transparency, Trump tried to get in front of a vote he could no longer stop.

4. Trump’s weakening political position

Richardson stresses that many Republicans now fear being caught in a cover-up more than they fear Trump himself:

• His mental acuity appears to be slipping in a way visible to the public.
• His tariffs are economically damaging and may be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
• His deportation raids are deeply unpopular.
• His and his allies’ flirtation with open white nationalism (e.g., Nick Fuentes) is splintering the party.

Republicans are increasingly calculating based on their own political survival, rather than automatically aligning with Trump.

5. The Senate becomes the key arena

The bill now goes to the Senate. To move forward, it will almost certainly need 60 votes for cloture.

• Democrats are expected to support it.
• The question is whether enough Republicans will join them.

Some early signals are telling. Senator Tommy Tuberville, for example, has said he will vote for the measure now that Trump has publicly blessed it. Tuberville, eyeing a run for governor of Alabama, clearly fears that voting against the release would hurt him politically.

In short, Senate Republicans face the same dilemma as House Republicans: stay loyal to Trump or avoid being seen as complicit in hiding whatever is in the Epstein files.

6. Trump’s real bet: Senate obstruction and DOJ stonewalling

Richardson suggests Trump’s apparent openness is a stall tactic:

• He is plainly hoping the Senate will bottle up the bill.
• If not, he has already signaled he will insist that Congress receive only what it is “legally entitled to,” setting up battles over how much the DOJ actually releases.

His Truth Social language, she argues, is basically a “neon sign” that he intends to fight over the scope of any disclosure.

7. Why a full cover-up is unlikely

Drawing on her historian’s experience, Richardson argues that fully erasing the Epstein story will be extremely difficult, for structural and practical reasons:

• Epstein operated among wealthy, high-profile elites using modern technologies: bank accounts, flight records, security cameras, digital communications, and so on.
• The FBI seized many thousands of hours of video from Epstein’s New York mansion.
• At least $1.1 billion moved through his accounts; bank records exist and are not easily destroyed.
• There are more than 1,000 survivors, who know names, dates, and events.
• Members of Congress can read their stories into the record under the Speech and Debate Clause, making defamation lawsuits impossible.

Her broader point: in a modern, highly documented world, powerful people leave trails. Burying a story like this requires silencing a very large number of institutions and individuals. It is possible, but historically the odds favor eventual leakage.

8. Why Republicans fear delay

Richardson notes that many Republicans are terrified of a delayed scandal:

• The longer the issue drags on, the greater the risk that a major document dump hits in 2026 or 2028, right before key elections.
• Some believe they must “rip the bandage off” now, rather than face an electoral catastrophe later.

As Trump’s ability to deliver votes diminishes and his toxicity grows, more Republicans begin to see him as an electoral liability rather than an asset.

9. Overall takeaway

Richardson’s core conclusions are:

• Nobody yet knows precisely what is in the FBI’s Epstein files.
• Trump’s own frantic behavior suggests that the files contain seriously damaging material.
• Given the scale of the network, the number of survivors, and the density of modern financial and digital records, it will be very hard to keep the truth permanently hidden.
• The Senate’s handling of this bill will be a key test of the Republican Party’s willingness to keep protecting Trump versus protecting itself.

From her historian’s perspective, Richardson argues that in a case like this it is ultimately harder to hide the story than to find it, especially once enough people decide they want the truth.

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It’s not just the Washington Post and the New York Times. Even fringy online media such as Huffington Post, as well as has-been online media such as Salon, are afraid to touch the Epstein document dump. Their main excuse is that the documents were “largely” already publicly available. When they do write about it, they prefer to make it a story about Democrats vs. Republicans in Congress, rather than what we know (and don’t yet know) about Trump’s involvement with Epstein because of a completely obvious government coverup.

The best place I’ve discovered so far where people are actually doing real sleuthing is in a Reddit forum, https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/. Some of the posts there will turn your stomach. I’ve appended an image of one such document below. The media’s excuse for ignoring the Tiffany Doe deposition is that it’s not new. But of course the media also ignored it several years ago when it was new. In the deposition Tiffany Doe says she witnessed Trump raping a 13-year-old and threatening to kill her family if she ever told anyone. Old news! Still nothing to see here! As usual, Trump managed to keep it out of court.

If I correctly understand the muddy pieces in the media, the recent document dump by a House committee is just a small sample of what the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department have on Epstein.

This is one of those times when it is very useful to see what is being said in foreign publications with anti-American agendas. With a completely corrupted U.S. government, and with an American media that is increasingly corrupted and increasingly timid, a huge amount of power both inside of government and outside of government is trying to keep Americans in the dark. Here’s a straightforward piece in Al Jazeera: Trump, Congress, and the Epstein files: What happens next?

It’s interesting that Russia Today, though, is working as hard to ignore the Epstein files as the American media are. There are many mentions of Russia and Russians in the Epstein files, so corrupt elements in Russia and corrupt elements in the U.S. are well aligned on this. The Russia Today story that totally tracks the U.S. coverage is here: Newly released Epstein email claims Trump ‘knew about the girls’.

It seems pretty apparent that, since Trump and his minions are so desperate to prevent any more disclosures, that they know how damning it will be. I keep wondering and wondering: When will the Republican Party, now that Trump has become so weak and is such a lame duck, come to its senses and cut Trump loose?

If and when Trump is destroyed — as seems very possible with the Epstein files — then throwing Trump under the bus would be the first priority of trying to save the Republican Party. But then, if they had any sense, they wouldn’t be Republicans. They’re still acting as though it’s impossible to remove them from power and bring them to justice. Though maybe, just maybe, some of them realize that the Epstein documents could bring them down and deliver a setback to American fascism that would last for a hundred years.

The above is an image of a part of the document dump. Here is the link.

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Update:

This afternoon Harry Litman posted, at Substack, the first thorough and fearless piece I’ve seen about the Epstein document dump: Ten Things We Now Know — or Can Fairly Surmise — From the Epstein Emails.

Litman is a lawyer and law professor with a sterling résumé.

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

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And just like that, overnight, a thousand lies fell apart. And it wasn’t just Republican lies that fell apart. Horsewash centrist narratives fell apart, too. Democrats are losers, are they? Democrats are too far left and have to move to the right, do they? Democrats will commit suicide if they play hardball? Democrats were silly to fret about threats to democracy when they should have talked about “abundance”?

But Democrats weren’t losers last night. From coast to coast, they won with drop-dead margins guaranteed to rip the rugs right out from under the triumpalism of Republicans and the barren lectures of the high-perch centrists.

It was a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won in New York, while a 67-year-old centrist (Andrew Cuomo) went down in flames. Californians gave Gavin Newsome, by a nearly two to one margin, the permission he needs to let Republicans know that if they try to gerrymander their way out of a Republican bloodbath in 2026, Democrats won’t just stand by and mewl while they get away with it. In Virginia, the new Democratic governor won by 15 points, and the new governor of New Jersey by 13 points.

Everybody knows that Republicans lie. That’s just a given. But I’m particulary amused by how the centrists (whether center-left or center-right) will now have to come up with some sneaky new ways of gilding a phony middle to dignify Republican lies.

At the New York Times, the idiot savant Ross Douthat has already started rolling out his new line: “Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think: New York’s next mayor won’t save the Democrats.”

I can’t wait to hear what Ezra Klein, another idiot savant at the Times, comes up with. But I will be very surprised if it doesn’t boil down to a cautionary rather than celebratory “Yes, but” with a large serving of cunningly centrist sleight of hand formulated to keep him in good graces with New York Times management. Klein has, for far too long, gotten away with the deceit that has gotten him so much attention — claiming to want to help Democrats, even as, again and again, he undermines Democrats so that he can keep his perch and troll for attention.

But even as we celebrate this turnaround for Democrats, I am strongly of the opinion that Democrats didn’t have all that much to do with it, other than not being Republicans. Rather, Republicans did this, not only by what they already have done in the past year, but also by showing the world what they intend to do.

A year ago, it was easier to get away with lying (abundance and lower prices!). That was just talk, after all. But foolish people fell for it. Now that Republicans own all the power, the lies are being exposed (except for the full truth about Jeffrey Epstein), and they don’t have to keep a lid on even the Hitler-lovers among them, or the greed . They can have a Great Gatsby party for the super-rich while millions go hungry, not just flaunting but celebrating the fact that they just don’t care, never did, and never will.

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Update 1, Krugman:

I had finished writing this post by 7 a.m., but I was waiting to put it up until Paul Krugman’s daily column arrived. Krugman usually posts around 6:30 a.m., but he was late today, no doubt because there was so much to write about. As expected, Krugman gets it right: Which Party Is in Trouble, Again?

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Update 2, Looking ahead:

What will Republicans do now? A normal party, after such ominous losses, would look for ways — ways more or less in keeping with the party’s principles — to change course. But Republicans can’t do that. For one, the entire party is enslaved to Trump, and Trump won’t let them. For two, all the behind-the-scenes money and power that control the party is never going to back down on the real agenda — making the rich richer and the poor poorer, while killing off functions of government that stand in the way of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. There are no doubt a few Republicans in Congress who would like to see some changes of course. My guess, though, is that they are more likely to join those who already have been driven out of the party than to succeed in getting Republicans to change.

Republicans have two basic options: Better lies capable of deceiving voters again, or a surefire (and criminal) way to stay in power after the 2026 midterm elections. MAGA Republicans have no problem at all with the criminality. After all, their pardons depend on staying in power. My guess is that Republicans will blend these two options.

This year, Republicans had total control of what we call “the narrative.” The media were cowed, Democrats were powerless. Next year will be different. It can’t be long before Gavin Newsome declares that he is running for president. The media will have to pay attention, and Newsome will scoop up and dispose of the Republican narrative like clumps of kitty litter. Next year, it should be fun again to be a Democrat and a liberal.

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Click here for high-resolution version.

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The Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, 1951. There is now a new edition from The Library of America, 2025, 880 pages.

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As the United States spirals downward into fascism, we come across more and more references to Hannah Arendt’s classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. I decided to have a go at reading it.

It is dense reading. The book is too long for many readers (including me). I scanned quickly through parts of it in which I found (to me) excessive detail in areas with less application to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Even so, there is much to be gained in historical perspective and political philosophy.

I asked ChatGPT to write the briefest possible summary of the book, with attention to how her themes are relevant to what is happening today:

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1. Antisemitism, Imperialism, and the Roots of Totalitarianism

Arendt begins by tracing antisemitism and imperialism in 19th-century Europe—not as isolated prejudices but as structural forces that eroded political equality and civic belonging. She argues that racism and economic domination abroad habituated Europeans to hierarchy and dehumanization at home.

→ Relevance: In the U.S., decades of racial hierarchy and overseas militarism have similarly normalized seeing groups of people—immigrants, minorities, political opponents—as “less real” citizens.

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2. The Decline of the Nation-State and the “Right to Have Rights”

With World War I and the collapse of empires, millions became stateless refugees, losing legal protection because “the Rights of Man” depended on belonging to a political community. Arendt called this loss “the right to have rights.”

→ Relevance: When U.S. officials strip voting rights, demonize migrants, or create categories of people effectively outside the law, they reproduce this condition of rightlessness within a nominal democracy.

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3. The Rise of Mass Society and the Collapse of Truth

Totalitarian movements arose not among fanatics alone but from atomized, isolated individuals who had lost trust in shared reality. The destruction of class, community, and factual discourse left people craving certainty and belonging, which demagogues supplied with ideology and conspiracy.

→ Relevance: The disintegration of civic trust, online propaganda, and “alternative facts” in today’s America are textbook examples of Arendt’s insight that loneliness and meaninglessness breed authoritarianism.

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4. Ideology and the Logic of Total Domination

Totalitarian ideologies (Nazism, Stalinism) claim to explain all events through one “scientific” process—race or history—reducing individuals to functions of that logic. Once accepted, facts no longer matter; only ideological consistency does.

→ Relevance: The MAGA movement’s self-contained mythology—“the deep state,” “stolen elections,” “invasion at the border”—illustrates this same replacement of reality with narrative necessity.

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5. Bureaucracy, Violence, and the Banality of Evil

Arendt’s later notion (developed from this groundwork) is that totalitarian systems rely less on monstrous villains than on ordinary people performing evil through obedience and routine.

→ Relevance: The bureaucratic enforcement of cruelty—family separations, deportations, targeted disenfranchisement—shows how moral numbness within institutions can sustain authoritarian power without overt tyranny.

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6. Her Core Warning

Totalitarianism, for Arendt, is not a foreign aberration but a modern temptation: the desire to escape freedom and uncertainty through ideology, conformity, and the worship of strength. It emerges when citizens stop caring about truth, abandon solidarity, and let politics become spectacle.

→ Contemporary parallel: When a public tolerates lies, applauds humiliation, and trades citizenship for tribal identity, the preconditions of total rule are already present.

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In brief:

Arendt’s central message is that freedom depends on truth, plurality, and political participation—and that when these erode under loneliness, propaganda, and cynicism, democratic societies drift toward totalitarian habits long before the camps or purges appear.

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No Fox News, no Facebook, responsible media, and decency in politics. They even cook from scratch! Source: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

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Once again, Ezra Klein, one of the smartest fools in the American media, is telling Democrats what’s wrong with them. The piece is “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism.”

Mainstream pundits like Klein would not be able to keep their jobs unless they kept to the now-standard centrist narrative. According to that narrative, Trump is in power because Democrats “lost touch” with voters. Here one can fill in the blanks about why that happened — “too preachy,” too far left, etc., etc. The pundits all have different answers according to their pre-existing politics.

But the question is not what’s wrong with Democrats and liberals. The question is: What’s wrong with voters? How does someone like Trump actually win a fair national election?

People are not more stupid than they used to be. But many things have changed since the days families gathered around their radios in the evening and tried to understand what was happening in the world. I would name four critically important — and I think obvious — things that help to explain where we are.

1. The world is much more complicated, much harder to understand, and changes ever faster.

2. The dark arts that are used to deceive people have made huge advances, and technologies have made the cost of deceiving people vastly cheaper than it used to be.

3. Changes in the world have eroded the privileges and status of millions of people. They’re not happy about that, they don’t really understand how it happened (because it’s complicated), and they are vulnerable to deceptions that offer easy answers that play on their prejudices and ignorance.

4. Those on the right are willing to do whatever it takes to get, and to keep, power and wealth. Deception, scapegoating, destruction and perversion of any institution that stands in their way — they don’t care. First they broke through the norms. Now they’re breaking through the law.

Though there are roots in the Reagan and Gingrich eras, this really began with Fox News in 1996. Fox News wasn’t a mere conservative outlet. It intentionally practiced deception. It featured rage as entertainment. It monetized anger. It drove moral panics. It fused right-wing politics and identity for white Americans, who had real grievances because of changes in the world. Back in cable days, academic studies found that voting patterns shifted to the right in counties where Fox News became available on cable.

What Fox News pioneered, social media industrialized. It weaponized the grievances of susceptible white people with deception fueled with rage. It enabled terrible people to win fair elections.

Now we need to ask: Who was not susceptible? Klein helpfully reminds us who that was in the piece I linked to above: “The only major group in which Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period [2012-2024] was college-educated white voters.”

Why might that be? Again, I think the answer is obvious. Education exposes people to multiple ways of seeking and testing knowledge — scientific reasoning, media literacy, probabilistic thinking, openness to complexity. Aggrieved people with modest educations were never able to gain the tools needed to see through the right-wing deceptions. They were, and very much still are, systematically and intentionally misinformed. Their prejudices, their ignorance, and their religiosity make them eager believers, blind to another thing that is obvious to those who are not susceptible — that the right-wing centers of power and wealth that developed new ways to control the little people actually don’t give a damn about them.

Where we are today did not come about because of failures by the Democratic Party. Sure, the Democratic Party has made mistakes and might have done better. But some mistakes are inevitable in a fragile coalition with a faulty and self-blaming understanding of why right-wingers have been winning elections. Where we are today is, rather, the success of a decades-long project of epistemic capture by an unprincipled and ruthless right wing. Klein’s centrism is nothing but a comforting fable for elite moderates who don’t want to admit that one side has been waging cognitive war while the other kept insisting on reality, civility, fairness, policy.

No one in the mainstream punditry is anywhere near saying what I think is rather obviously true: There can be no real solution until the people who are being deceived somehow start caring whether what they believe is true. Right-wing centers of wealth and power are not going to stop lying and refining the industry that delivers the lies.

So here’s the problem, and it’s a huge problem: How do you teach people who have been taught otherwise that the solution to their grievances is the solution that Democrats propose: Reality, civility, fairness, and policy. Education can manage that. Propaganda can only tear it down. Education is hard, and expensive. Propaganda is dirt cheap.

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Peter Thiel. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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It was back in 2021 when Fiona Hill wrote, “Russia is America’s ghost of Christmas future.” And now here we are.

Fiona Hill’s words might have been just a metaphorical warning back in 2021. Now it’s obvious not only what Trump’s intentions are, it’s equally obvious that the Republican Party, Republicans in Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court are fully on board. They want a Putin-like head of state with unlimited power. The country will be run not for the people, but for the billionaire oligarchy and the elite but incompetent hacks who are corrupt enough, and loyal enough to Trump, to be a part of the government.

We’ve had Elon Musk’s number for quite a while now. But even more chilling is how tech billionaires who formerly supported Democrats have now gone over to Trump. And why wouldn’t they? The American economy, as in Russia, is being allocated out to its billionaire oligarchs. They all want their piece of it. For example, in Politico: “‘Slap in the face’: Marc Benioff’s Trump turn stuns San Francisco.” Benioff’s wealth has doubled in the last five years.

Those who now control the power of government can give the oligarchs a choice: Come on board and get your share, or be targeted, corruptly, by the law, like George Soros.

Trump could never have gained power without the help of the deplorables’ machinery of religion, so Christian nationalists also are getting their share of the government. Kevin Roberts, a Christian nationalist and president of the Heritage Foundation (which is behind Project 2025) said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

We’re past the point at which billionaires had to be discreet about their intentions. They talk openly now. We can see clearly now what they are and what they want. If they stay in power, it’s clear what America is to be.

Peter Thiel actually gave a series of four lectures to the Commonwealth Club of California. The title of the lectures was, “The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series.” Recordings of the lectures were leaked. You can read about what Thiel said here, in the Washington Post; and here, in the Guardian.

So we know what these people want. We also know what they are afraid of. What they are afraid of is democracy. In a democracy they would be heavily taxed, and their power would be curbed. Thiel has been explicit about this, as when he says that democracy is incompatible with freedom. He thinks only of his own freedom, of course. The freedoms (and rights) of people like us mean nothing to him. To him, we are not free people with rights and freedoms. Rather, we are dangerous threats to his freedom.

It’s really pretty terrifying what great wealth can do to people. We’ve reached another point in history in which a few people with great wealth believe — and it may be true — that they have more power than the people and that they have a right — God-given, no less — to use that power, bloodlessly or not.

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Source: U.S. Department of Defense via YouTube

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Regular readers know that my view of the deplorables is very different from that of mainstream political pundits. The mainstream view is (or at least professes to be) that conservatives are entirely normal people who for whatever reason are politically conservative.

My view is that that view is mistaken, and that the mistake is a very dangerous one. My view is that there is something wrong with conservative minds, cognitively and morally. They are cognitively and morally deformed. Conservative moral values — love of authority, a fetish for purity, an uncaring attitude toward those unlike themselves — are self-evidently inferior moral values that cause great harm in the world. I understand why mainstream pundits can’t say any of this. Nevertheless, I think it’s self-evidently true.

Recent events provide evidence that this is true.

I have written in the past about one of the most obvious consequences of deplorable incapacity. That’s the inability to assess character, which involves both cognitive and moral deformities. A normal person will see through a con man pretty quickly. A morally normal person will be disgusted by people whose words and deeds reveal hatred, a love of cruelty, a lust for power, and the will to dominate and exploit. A morally normal person does not need scapegoats. A morally normal person quickly sees through false piety and isn’t deceived by the stunted but sanctimonious people who strut around saying God this and God that. A morally normal person is not deceived by the lies that such people tell. And above all a morally normal person does not see such people as sent by God to rule over us all.

Watching a room full of America’s top generals coldly stonewalling Trump and Pete Hegseth was one of the most beautiful and encouraging things I’ve seen lately. The United States trains its military brass for rationality and character. Those generals are not the sort of people to be fooled by the kind of trash talk and lies that deplorable voters love so well.

But here’s the thing. Both Trump and Hegseth, because of their moral and cognitive deformities, were completely unable to see in advance — or to understand after the fact — the response that their “loser and suckers” trash talk would get from rational people of vastly superior character (and intelligence). As I’ve argued here many times in the past, people cannot perceive above their own level. Or, to say the same thing in a slightly different way, conservative minds simply do not have the cognitive and moral capacity to model healthy and normal minds. If they had the capacity to model cognitively and morally healthy minds, then they would have healthy minds. Instead, they unconsciously project their own demons onto the people they don’t like. Even just recently, how many preachers and priests have been arrested for molesting children at the very same time they were demonizing others (always liberals) for what they themselves were doing?

The Guardian, partly because it’s unapologetically liberal and partly because it’s based in London, often says things that the American media cannot or will not say. There have been two such pieces recently:

A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

Why Trump’s speech to US military top brass was such a disaster

One of the things that I think we must admit is that deplorable people, because of their incapacities, are simply not reachable by any rational liberal discourse — at least, not while they are being wound up by uber deplorables whom they regard as authoritative. There are many reasons why I am skeptical of all the many strategies that have been proposed for “reaching out” to them and somehow winning them back to rational discourse and a rational and decent politics. That, I maintain, cannot happen until they realize that they have been betrayed by, exploited by, and abandoned by the con men who claim to have come to save them. I believe that process has started to happen.

One more thing about all those generals: I very much want to believe that they would never carry out illegal orders or allow the troops and officers under them to do so. I append here Hitler’s loyalty oath, August 2, 1934. This expresses what Trump and Hegseth want. Unless they have a plan for firing and replacing 800 top generals, they’re not going to get it.

“I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.”

One might ask: Since these people are always with us (and always have been), then one might ask why they are far more dangerous in some eras more than others. As I see it, that’s because they don’t and can’t self-organize. They don’t have a gift for that. Instead they require someone to wind them up, some kind of charismatic uber-authoritarian figure both to feed them with their dangerous ideas and to organize them and motivate them for political purposes.

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Update

I’m well aware that the above blog post is harsh and uncompromising. Yet to back down on what I believe to be true would make me as timid and mealy-mouthed as the mainstream punditry. After I wrote this, I asked ChatGPT 5 for a critique. Its first response sounded pretty much like what I’d expect, say, from most liberal pundits — mealy-mouthed and eager to display what a critic who thinks more like I do aptly called “civility theater.” I very much support civility in everyday good-faith interactions. But civility in the face of fascism is a different matter. Wasn’t that Neville Chamberlain’s strategy? It took a war. My own father fought in such a war.

I asked ChatGPT to write a version of the piece that is more polite and with an academic rather than rhetorical tone. Below is the result. I like it.

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The Incapacities of Deplorable People: Notes Toward a Moral Anthropology

Public discourse in liberal democracies tends to assume that political difference arises from diversity of temperament or experience, not from fundamental disparities in moral or cognitive capacity. The prevailing view, especially among mainstream pundits, is that conservatives and liberals represent complementary aspects of human nature—order versus change, stability versus progress—each necessary for the balance of a healthy society.

I believe this assumption is mistaken, and dangerously so. It mistakes a pathology for a perspective. There exists, and has always existed, a subset of human character that is both cognitively limited and morally stunted: drawn to authority, comforted by conformity, and hostile to complexity. Such people are what modern political vernacular calls “deplorables.” They are not evil in the melodramatic sense, but their incapacity for moral imagination makes them available to evil.

I. Moral perception and cognitive limits

The capacity for moral judgment depends on the ability to perceive character—to recognize empathy, integrity, and cruelty in others. That ability, in turn, depends on cognitive maturity: on abstraction, self-reflection, and an inner life rich enough to imagine the perspective of another.

Some people, for reasons that may be partly psychological and partly developmental, appear to lack this capacity. They are easily deceived by spectacle, incapable of irony, and unable to model minds more complex than their own. What they call “strength” is often mere aggression; what they take for “authenticity” is simply the absence of self-control.

In this sense, moral and cognitive deformity are intertwined. To be morally stunted is to be unable to think deeply about others; to be cognitively shallow is to have no internal resources against the seductions of power. These are not partisan defects but structural ones, as visible in history’s worst moments as they are in the present.

II. The social mechanics of cruelty

The twentieth century demonstrated, repeatedly, how ordinary people could become participants in extraordinary cruelty. Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil” remains the most unsettling description: evil committed not by monsters, but by conformists whose incapacity for thought made them susceptible to ideology (Arendt 1963).

The Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and his collaborators, described this phenomenon as the authoritarian personality: characterized by submission to hierarchy, aggression toward out-groups, and a preference for certainty over ambiguity (Adorno et al. 1950). Later experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo confirmed what history already knew—that the architecture of obedience can transform the timid into tormentors (Milgram 1974; Zimbardo 2007).

In these frameworks, “deplorable” behavior is not a mystery but a predictable outcome of certain dispositions: a limited capacity for empathy combined with a longing for belonging. When such individuals find a charismatic figure who validates their resentments and channels their fear into hatred, they become a political force. They cannot self-organize; they must be organized, wound up, given a script and an enemy.

III. The unreachability problem

Liberal optimism holds that rational discourse can bridge moral divides. But persuasion presupposes mutual access to reason and empathy. When one party lacks that access, dialogue becomes futile. The moral incapacity at issue here is not ignorance—ignorance can be corrected—but a structural defect in moral imagination.

The deplorable mind does not misinterpret liberal appeals to decency; it fails to register them. It hears tolerance as weakness and equality as threat. Reasoning with such people is like speaking color to the colorblind. The recognition of this limit is not elitism; it is realism.

IV. The quiet danger of the compliant

One might ask whether this diagnosis amounts to dehumanization. I would argue the opposite. The deplorables are recognizably human—all too human—in their need for authority and their yearning for simplicity. Left unprovoked, they are often harmless: family-centered, tradition-minded, suspicious of abstraction. They become dangerous only when mobilized by figures who exploit those traits.

This pattern recurs throughout history. Every authoritarian movement depends not only on its leaders but on its followers—the small, decent people who wish to be told what to do and whom to hate. Their obedience is the raw material of political evil.

When I say that such people are morally and cognitively deformed, I mean that their psychological architecture lacks a safeguard that others possess: the inner resistance that says no when an authority commands cruelty. That safeguard—call it conscience, empathy, or imagination—is what separates the moral adult from the moral child.

V. The lesson of the oath

The military oath imposed by Hitler in 1934 offers a stark illustration of this dynamic:

“I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler… and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.”

What mattered was not the words themselves but the psychological readiness they revealed: a willingness to surrender judgment, to externalize morality, to let obedience replace thought. The dream of every would-be tyrant—and of his followers—is the same.

The American generals who recently met Trump’s insults with silence exemplify the opposite disposition. Their professionalism rests on habits of reason and self-command that inoculate against charismatic abuse. Their restraint, their very thinking, stands as a quiet rebuke to the culture of cruelty that cheers at every insult and mistake.

VI. What follows

To speak of moral deformity is uncomfortable in liberal society, which prefers pluralism to judgment. Yet moral relativism, however humane in intention, becomes complicity when faced with cruelty. Evil is not always deliberate, but it is real; and the line that separates decency from depravity often runs through the capacity to imagine the suffering of others.

The deplorable mind lacks that capacity. It is not reachable through reason because it has surrendered the faculties by which reason operates. Our task, then, is not to redeem such people but to limit their power—to build institutions, norms, and narratives that keep their appetites from shaping the state.

In quieter times, they may again resemble hobbits: small, local, unambitious, and mostly harmless. But history shows how easily the hobbit becomes the soldier of a cause he does not understand. The difference lies not in essence but in circumstance—and in whether we, the rest of us, have the courage to recognize deformation when we see it.

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References

Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row.

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press.

Fromm, Erich. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Milgram, Stanley. 1974. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row.

Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books.

Stanley, Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.

Weil, Simone. 1952. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Zimbardo, Philip G. 2007. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.

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With the United States in a tailspin into fascism, the New York Times’ star columnists work ever harder to change the subject. The subject is never fascism. Anything but that! It’s always: What’s wrong with the left?

Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein have slightly different ways of doing this. But the very idea of their doing a “show” together reveals that their purpose is the same: Distract from the mainstream media’s catastrophic failure to perceive where the U.S. democracy stands from a historical perspective. Try to keep a conversation going about how the left, not the right, is to blame for what is happening in the U.S. today.

Douthat: I also think that there’s a way in which at the peak of progressive cultural power, there was a sense that progressives were censorious scolds who certainly didn’t like populists and conservatives, but seemed to not like a lot of people generally. Today, I feel like it’s almost — and this is, again, impressionistic — but do progressives like themselves?

Klein: You really want to put them on the couch. But the answer is no. [Laughs.]

Douthat: The answer is no, right? And in a way, that’s always been true — nothing like a self-hating liberal.

What kind of minds does this nonsense come from? And why is it in the New York Times? Neither of these two hacks is half as smart as he thinks he is.