Our Next Racist President?

Posted on December 22, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

The bitter infighting over antisemitism, free speech and bigotry during Turning Point USA’s annual national conference not only exposed fissures in President Trump’s movement but also laid bare a challenge for his potential successor.

How would his likely heir apparent handle an explosive debate among Republicans over whether extremists and conspiracy theorists should be embraced or excluded from the conservative coalition?

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance gave an answer, suggesting he was more than willing to forgo imposing any moral red lines.

“When I say that I’m going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you — each and every one,” Mr. Vance said at Turning Point USA’s annual gathering, AmericaFest, where prominent conservative leaders called on their peers to stop promoting conspiracies and hate. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

The vice president’s plea for a big-tent coalition, however, belied the cracks visible in the past week in his party. The annual conservative gathering was just a year ago a platform united under Mr. Trump and elevated by its co-founder, Charlie Kirk, a young rising figure on the right. Mr. Kirk’s assassination in September galvanized Republicans and fueled conspiracy theories among them, and it prompted Mr. Vance to call on Americans to coalesce around criticizing what he called the far left.

This year, the event showcased the intense jostling over the direction of Mr. Trump’s movement and whom it would platform.

Last week, Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator, warned that the “conservative movement was in serious danger” by those willing to amplify conspiracies, including Candace Owens, the podcaster widely accused of antisemitism. She has also spread unfounded theories about Mr. Kirk’s death. Mr. Shapiro’s warning also targeted Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who recently held a softball interview with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite. Mr. Carlson later accused Mr. Shapiro of trying to censor him.

On Friday, Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian American who is running for governor of Ohio as a Republican, also criticized a faction of the party. He went after those who have embraced the idea that so-called “heritage Americans” — a predominantly white group whose families have been in the country for multiple generations — have a greater claim to the nation than more recent arrivals.

Those comments appeared to put Mr. Ramaswamy at odds with Mr. Vance, who has spoken out against “importing millions and millions of low-wage serfs” and argued that mass migration was the “theft of the American dream.

Mr. Ramaswamy also took on those who have issued derogatory attacks against Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha Vance. And he said Mr. Fuentes and others promoting hateful views had “no place in the future of the conservative movement.”

JD Vance gestures with one hand while speaking behind a lectern in a darkened auditorium. Red stage lighting casts a hazy glow over the bottom of the frame.
As vice president, Mr. Vance has on multiple occasions refused to pick a side over interparty fights over bigotry.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times

Mr. Vance, however, left open the possibility that they did.

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce and deplatform,” Mr. Vance said, arguing that Mr. Kirk had welcomed debate. “We have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”

Mr. Vance’s team did not respond on Sunday to requests for comment.

Mr. Vance in the past has disavowed Mr. Fuentes, calling him in an interview with CBS News a “total loser” who had no place in Mr. Trump’s coalition during the 2024 campaign. And he played down Mr. Fuentes’s influence in a blog interview published on Sunday, while bluntly criticizing antisemitism, “ethnic hatred” and attacks on his wife.

“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement,” Mr. Vance said in the interview, which was published after his speech at Turning Point USA. “Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re Black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting.”

As vice president, Mr. Vance has on multiple occasions refused to pick a side in interparty fights over bigotry.

When the emergence of a Telegram group chat showed Republican elected leaders and young party activists routinely using racist and homophobic language, as well as invoking Hitler, Mr. Vance compared them to “anything said in a college group chat.” He also embraced false claims about Haitian Americans in the 2024 race, declining to condemn those who spread racist conspiracy theories.

And on Sunday, Mr. Vance declined to issue warnings of extremist figures like other speakers at the conference, instead arguing that the coalition was open to all as long as they “love America.”

After receiving the endorsement for president of Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, Mr. Vance encouraged supporters to unite around Mr. Trump’s immigration policies and the targeting of diversity initiatives. The White House has argued that they have unfairly led to the disenfranchisement of white men.

“We don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex, so we have relegated D.E.I. to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it had belonged,” Mr. Vance said, using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

He received some of the loudest applause from the crowd when he told attendees that “by the grace of God we will always be a Christian nation.”

Mr. Vance also continued to target Somali Americans after weeks of Mr. Trump’s insulting the immigrant community from the White House. Mr. Vance said Omar Fateh, a Minnesota state senator of Somali descent, had previously run for mayor of “Mogadishu.”

“I mean Minneapolis,” Mr. Vance said of the city with a large Somali American population. “Little Freudian slip there.”

Mr. Fateh said on social media after the speech that he was born in Washington, D.C., and that his father “came to America on a scholarship” in the early 1960s. He added that he was “proud to represent MPLS.”

While Mr. Vance has not announced plans to run for president, he showed signs on Sunday that he had his eyes on the future. He said Democrats were “already talking about 2028” and criticized the party’s potential leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. He said that Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Black Democrat in Texas running for Senate, had a “street girl persona” that “is about as real as her nails.”

Ms. Crockett said in a text message that the vice president was seeking to distract. “Republicans like JD Vance attack my nails and lashes because they can’t keep up with me when it comes to debating the issues,” she said. “While JD Vance is talking about my looks, I’m talking about legislation. I’m talking about lowering the costs for groceries, utilities and health care.”

Mr. Vance’s lack of similar condemnation for fringe G.O.P. figures was met with rebukes from some in his party.

“I’ll never vote for someone who is ambiguous in their stance against antisemitism or who can’t see that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a threat to our long-range strategic interests,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said.

Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser, praised Mr. Vance’s speech, calling it a “fantastic unifying message heading into the 2026 midterms.” Mr. Miller added: “When the time comes, I think the vice president will be ready to pick up the baton from President Trump.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

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Ezra Klein: The Magic Is Dead

Posted on December 21, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

In January, I made a prediction: “I suspect we are at or near the peak of Trump vibes.” Now, as this long year grinds to its end, I think it can be said more declaratively: The Trump vibe shift is dead. And there are already glimmers of what will follow it./

The Trump vibe shift was American culture and institutions moving toward President Trump and Trumpism with a force unexplained by his narrow electoral victory. It was Mark Zuckerberg donning a chain and saying that the corporate world was too hostile to “masculine energy.” It was corporate executives using Trump as an excuse to wrest control of their companies back from their workers. It was the belief that Trump’s 2024 coalition — which stretched from Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer to Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard — was the arrival of something new rather than, as many thought in 2016, the final heave of something old.

As 2025 closes, Trump’s polling sits in the low 40s, with some surveys showing him tumbling into the 30s. Democrats routed Republicans across the year’s elections, winning governorships in New Jersey and Virginia easily and overperforming in virtually every race they contested.

Moderate Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to bring to the House floor a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. Marjorie Taylor Greene is retiring. Elon Musk said he regretted joining the administration to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Joe Rogan called Trump’s immigration policy “insane.” The right is at war with itself over the Epstein files and how much antisemitism and anti-Indian racism is too much antisemitism and anti-Indian racism.

A year ago, we kept hearing that Trump was cool now. Is anyone saying that now?

There is much to be said about where and how Trumpism ran aground. But a place to start is here: Trump’s electoral victory and his cultural momentum were in conflict. Trump won the 2024 election narrowly: 49.9 percent of the popular vote and an edge in the battleground states so slim that flipping 175,000 votes would have thrown the election to Kamala Harris. Poll after poll showed that the cost of living was what powered Trump’s victory.

But Trump’s victory provided confidence and cover to chief executives and billionaires and celebrities and institutions whose frustrations and resentments had concentrated across the Biden years. If Trump could take back power, so could they. And they did: Companies gutted diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies they never actually wanted; comedians felt freed from the language police; the purity tests of the left gave way to the gleeful cruelty of the right. The force of the cultural correction gave MAGA a momentum that the election results never justified. That created the conditions for overreach.

“There is little in the election results to suggest the public wants a sharp rightward lurch,” I wrote then. “But Trump and his team are jacked into the online vibes machine, and they want to meet the moment they sense. I doubt there would have been ideological modesty in any Trump administration, but I am particularly skeptical we will see it in this one.”

Now Trumpism is failing both the voters and the vibes. It is failing the voters in the most obvious of ways: Trump ran for office promising lower prices. But he also ran on policies — tariffs and deportations — that raise prices by driving up the costs of goods and labor. Nor did Trump try to persuade Americans that they should bear higher prices to subsidize domestic manufacturing or raise native-born wages or to isolate China.

Instead, Trump lied to his voters. He promised that Americans would pay nothing and gain everything. Then came Liberation Day and the markets began shuddering and the price of coffee began rising and Trump has been caught between his long-held beliefs about trade and his recognition that Americans do not want to pay the costs of his policies. He backs off the tariffs when the pain threatens markets or when China’s export restrictions threaten American manufacturers, but he has not simply abandoned the project.

The result has been a tariff regime that has raised prices, confused companies and alienated allies but has accomplished very little. The United States lost manufacturing jobs in 2025. The pivot to isolating China was short-lived — after all the tumult, the added tariff on most Chinese goods is 20 percent and Trump is now selling advanced Nvidia chips to China. The labor market is weakening. Deficits are rising. Trump may give his economic management an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” but a recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that only 36 percent of Americans approve of how he is running the economy, and Democrats have muscled their way to a four-point edge on the issue.

Then there’s the vibes. I’ll admit to surprise that Trump’s ghoulish response to the killings of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner attracted so much opprobrium on the right. Trump routinely responds to personal tragedy with narcissistic cruelty. There is a sickness in his soul. But that sickness was, we were repeatedly told, what the culture hungered for. I think, here, of New York magazine’s cover story, “The Cruel Kids’ Table”:

This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth’s into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a V.I.P. section “like a little Mexican.” Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause.

Offense can be refreshing when injected into conformity. But cruelty as the dominant culture repulses most people. “The immigration thing — the way it looks is horrific,” Rogan said in October. “When you’re just arresting people in front of their kids — normal, regular people who’ve been here for 20 years — everybody who has a heart can’t get along with that.” Nick Fuentes clips might carry a transgressive charge in MAGA group chats. But how many Americans will see themselves reflected in a political movement partly led by a celibate white supremacist who thinks Hitler is cool?

In Trump’s first term, there was a constant yearning for a return-to-normalcy candidate. Many Democrats believed that Joe Biden or someone like him would defeat Trump in the polls and restore a more familiar form of political competition. That was enough to win the 2020 election, but not enough to turn the page on Trumpism. Instead, it roared back with even more force in 2024. Normalcy is not enough. The Democratic Party will need to represent something new, as opposed to retrenching to something old.

A year ago, Democrats understood MSNBC and The Washington Post but seemed flummoxed by YouTube and TikTok. But younger and less terminally cautious Democrats — Zohran Mamdani in New York City, James Talarico in Texas, Gavin Newsom in California — are showing that Democrats can win the attention wars.

What’s struck me about all of them is the way they embody a vibe different from anything Trumpism offers. The defining expression of Trump’s second term — the expression he chose for his official portrait — is a scowl. Mamdani’s smile is now its omnipresent opposite, potent enough to reduce Trump to a purring chumminess in the Oval Office. Talarico’s appeal is rooted in his Christianity; the response to him reflects, in part, the yearning for an explicitly moral and spiritual politics in the face of so much callousness and nihilism. Newsom has vaulted himself into 2028 front-runner status by following two seemingly contradictory impulses: He mocks Trump on social media even as he hosts genuine conversations with right-wing figures like Steve Bannon, Michael Savage and Charlie Kirk. It’s resistance politics incongruously married to a searching pluralism, and it’s kept Newsom atop my social media feeds all year.

Politics, of course, is more than just vibes. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill ran on declaring a state of emergency to freeze utility rates. Mamdani ran on free child care and rent freezes. Talarico is taking aim at the rage economy of social media and the corruptionof big-money politics. Newsom is embracing abundance and a fight-fire-with-fire approach to redistricting.

Political backlash always seeks the opposing force to the present regime. Closed and cruel are on their way out. What comes next, I suspect, will present itself as open, friendly and assertively moral. But it will also need to credibly offer what Trump and Trumpism have failed to deliver: real solutions to the problems Americans face.

Posted in America, Congress, democracy, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, economy, foreign policy, government, racism, Republican Party, scandals | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

After almost a year of Trump II: What’s it REALLY all about?

Posted on December 20, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

The fundamental choice is democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and equal political rights VERSUS white male Christian nationalism 

By Robert Reich/ Robert Reich Substack/ December 19, 2025

Friends,

Today, after almost a year of Trump’s second regime, I want to talk about the challenge Trump and his regime pose to America’s moral purpose. The best way into the subject is, I think, to ask a few questions about what’s been happening, and then offer an answer to all of them.

Questions:

— Why does Trump’s latest National Security Strategy, released this month, make no distinction between despotism and democracy?

— Why is Trump abandoning Europe and siding with Putin over Ukraine? 

— Why is Trump also solicitous of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince MBS, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Benjamin Netanyahu? 

— Why is the Trump regime so intent on detaining or deporting undocumented people in the United States who have not committed any crimes and have been productive members of their communities for years? 

— Why is the Trump regime barring people from even entering the United States whose home countries are predominantly Muslim or whose inhabitants have mostly black or brown skin? 

— Why has the Trump regime allowed Andrew and Tristan Tate — arrested in Romania in 2023 on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women — to come to the United States?

— Why is the Trump regime admitting into the U.S. white South Africans as refugees, but not Black or brown people who are in grave danger around the world?

— Why has the Trump regime cracked down on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in universities, the public sector, and the private sector? 

— Why has Trump targeted for prosecution or intimidation so many women of color who are now in, or have recently occupied, positions of power in the United States? 

Answer to all of the above:

Trump and the people around him are not interested in protecting America’s democratic ideals from the global enemies of those ideals. They reject the progress America and the rest of what used to be called the “free world” have achieved in advancing democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and human rights. 

The world they seek is one of white supremacy, male dominance, the superiority of the Judeo-Christian tradition over all other creeds, and America-first nationalism. 

White male Christian nationalism is about power. It seeks to give white Christian men power over Black and brown people, over women, over people who are not Judeo-Christians, over people born outside the United States, and over anyone who does not fit neatly into the structure and roles of a traditional family. 

White male Christian nationalism has more in common with Vladimir Putin, who condemns LGBTQ+ people and scoffs at human rights; with Saudi Arabia, which confines women to second-class status and murders critics of the regime; and with Viktor Orban, who views Muslim immigrants as direct threats to Europe’s Christian values, than it does with America’s traditional allies.

So, when Trump and his regime refer to America’s “national security,” they are not talking about security against authoritarian regimes that eschew democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Their view of “national security” is security against forces — both inside America as well as abroad — that advocate democracy, the rule of law, and human rights (which they describe derisively as “woke” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) rather than white male Christian nationalism. 

White male Christian nationalism is a throwback to the world before the enlightenment of the 18th century took root in the West; before the core ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights provided a beacon to America and the world; before Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man. 

America has not always lived up to these core enlightenment ideals, but it has at least striven to face its shortcomings and overcome its moral hypocrisies. It fought a horrendous civil war that ended the scourge slavery. It extended voting rights to women. It enacted the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts to guarantee equal political rights to Black and brown people. It committed itself to equal marriage rights. 

Our system of rights has rested on a civic culture that demands mutual respect, adherence to the egalitarian principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, rejection of bigotry and hatred, dedication to freedom and justice, and deep suspicion of centralized power whether in government or in the economy. 

***

After almost a year of Trump’s second term — even more violent and extreme than his first — the moral challenge he and his regime pose to the soul of this nation has become clear: the loss of our core ideals, the deterioration of our founding principles, and the abdication of America’s moral authority in the world.

What do you think?

Posted in America, Congress, democracy, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, economy, foreign policy, government, politics, religion, Republican Party, scandals, U.S. Constitution | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

What Distraction Should I Use?

Posted on December 16, 2025 by Arlen Grossman
Posted in America, Barack Obama, cartoon, Donald Trump, ethics, government, humor, media, political cartoon, politics, Venezuela, war | Leave a comment

Is the Morbidly Rich’s “Brilliance” Just a Threat to the Republic?

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

In 11 months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), & their bought-&-paid-for politicians…

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ December 15, 2025

The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”

And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.

Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.

The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.

Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.

(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)

Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.

Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:

“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”

The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin

“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land

Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.

All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.

As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution. And America’s Founders believed it.

Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”

And we get there through voting.

This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.

As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But were they right? Is nature actually democratic?

Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.

We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.

But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.

“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”

Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”

Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and JD Vance, they and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.

“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.

Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”

What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.

“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.

With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm, or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.

Dr. Tim Roper told me:

“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”

I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.

He was emphatic:

“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“

Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.

When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).

It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.

This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.

As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.

”:

Posted in America, anti-trust, corporations, democracy, Economics, economy, Elon Musk, government, politics, Republican Party | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Sunday thought: Really, truly, the end of Trump is near

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

I agree with Reich. Trump is losing it faster and faster. He says more crazy, racist, hateful, and false statements every day. He has failed to live up to his impossible promises. His job approval numbers continue to plummet, and he has no rational plans to correct his failures and inadequacies.

Reich reminds us that when in trouble Trump “does the biggest and craziest things to deflect attention.” I most fear he will invade Venezuela to distract from current and future investigations, and ratchet up the chaos and failings of our government to much greater levels than we have even now.

–TBPR Editor

By Robert Reich/ RobertReich.substack.com/ December 7, 2025

Friends,

Ten and a half long months ago, America began spiraling in a terrifying direction. We knew Trump was bad; his first term had been a calamity. But few of us were prepared for the catastrophe that awaited us in the second. 

Part of it came because Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress, and Trump was able to intimidate and browbeat them into submitting to whatever he wanted to do. 

Now, finally, the ground is shifting. 

Some congressional Republicans are turning hawkish on the budget and reject Trump’s zany notion of $2,000 “tariff dividend” checks, as well as his stated desire to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for two years.

Russian hawks dislike Trump’s love fest with Putin on Ukraine. 

Nor did they appreciate his happy meeting with Zohran Mamdani. 

Or his refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. 

Some are demanding to know more about Trump’s and Hegseth’s bombing (and re-bombing) of boats in the Caribbean. 

When Marjorie Taylor Greene decided to pick up her bigotry and leave Congress, I assumed it was because she had picked a fight with Trump and lost. But other Republican members are threatening to depart too — potentially leaving Trump and his puppet Speaker Mike Johnson without enough votes to stop the Democrats. 

Could it be — is it really possible? — that a few congressional Republicans are now feeling their backbones? 

Yes — which is enough for other congressional Republicans to realize they, too, have vertebrae. 

Why now?

Because the MAGA base that every congressional Republican is so afraid of and solicitous toward is falling apart. 

They’re finally seeing Trump for what he is: a man without principle except getting richer and more powerful and engraving his name on buildings. 

A lame-duck president who said he’d make life better for MAGA starting on “day one” but has made life worse for MAGA by month 10. 

He doesn’t even believe in lowering prices. He calls the affordability crisis a “con” job. 

Democrats swept last month’s off-year elections and performed better than usual in Tuesday’s House race in a bright-red Tennessee district. 

If you’re taking some satisfaction from the MAGA crackup, don’t let your guard down.

It’s when Trump feels he’s in trouble that he does the biggest and craziest things to deflect attention. 

So, my friends, beware.

Posted in America, Donald Trump, economy, government, Justice, politics, Republican Party | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Many Times Will the Morbidly Rich Crash America Before We Learn?

Posted on December 5, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

Why every era ruled by the morbidly rich ends the same way: corruption, collapse, and ordinary people paying the bill..

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ December 2, 2025

One of the greatest gifts Donald Trump and the thirteen billionaires he pulled into his administration have given America is the reminder, finally and once and for all, that just because somebody is rich doesn’t mean they’re smart. Particularly if they inherited their starting capital from daddy, like Trump and Musk both did. 

Wealth in this country has become so intertwined with our mythologies of genius, destiny, and merit that we’ve ended up elevating into near-sainthood (and electing to high office) some of the least thoughtful, least competent, and least self-aware people ever to walk a boardroom floor. It’s a dangerous confusion, and one with deep roots.

I still remember a conversation on my radio program back in 2009 with Bill Gates Sr., one of the kindest and most grounded men I’ve hosted on the air. He told me, matter-of-factly, that while his son Bill was indeed a very smart guy, he also had the sort of upper-middle-class safety net that most Americans could only dream about. Had Bill Jr. been born poor, Gates Sr. said, the trajectory of his life (and the existence of Microsoft) would likely have been very different. 

Talent exists everywhere; opportunity does not. That’s true for the brilliant, and just as true for the average or below-average minds who happen to be born into staggering wealth. Privilege — not genius — is what insulates foolish people from the consequences of foolish decisions.

Trump’s casinos went bankrupt even though casinos are literally engineered to make money. He claimed windmills cause cancer. He altered a hurricane map with a Sharpie rather than admit he was wrong. His incompetent handling of Covid caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and now he’s up all night ragetweeting.

Elon Musk blew $44 billion on a website he’s turned into a global punchline, called a Thai cave-rescue diver a “pedo” because the man contradicted him, and cheer-led the destruction of USAID, an act that has severely damaged America’s international soft power, handed a huge geopolitical gift to Russia and China, and already led to what could be millions of unnecessary deaths. Mark Zuckerberg spent tens of billions on a plastic cartoon “metaverse” almost nobody asked for or used. 

These aren’t the moves of geniuses. They’re the stumbles of men surrounded by people too afraid to tell them the truth. But this isn’t just about today’s crop of oligarchs. We’ve seen this movie before. 

The plantation oligarchs of the 1850s South — men who were some of the richest Americans ever to live — tried to build a continent-wide authoritarian slave empire. They launched a war against democracy itself in 1861 and almost 700,000 Americans died in that Civil War as Lincoln and the Union fought valiantly to preserve our democracy. 

During the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age, the robber barons — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould, Vanderbilt — were worshiped as industrial gods. Tesla and Edison (genuine geniuses) were hailed as saints of electricity, but it was the financiers behind them who used their inventions to create monopolies and accumulate dynastic wealth. 

Only later did America realize that many of these men were less geniuses than gamblers with armies of lawyers; that they built fortunes by crushing competition, often hurting communities, workers, and even the nation itself in their unquenchable quest for more, more, more money!

And then there was the Roaring Twenties, when the super-rich were again treated like royalty. The stock market was their playground, the nation their casino. Republican Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover gave them everything they asked for, from banking deregulation to massive tax breaks. 

The result was the Republican Great Depression, and an entire decade of breadlines and collapsed banks. It took FDR and a generation of reformers to remind America that letting the wealthy run wild always ends the same way: with ordinary Americans paying the price.

After Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms, after the humiliation of the Depression, after decades of regulations and high taxes and guardrails to keep the oligarchs from crashing the system again, the morbidly rich mostly kept their heads down. 

For a while, at least. 

But by the late 1960s and early 70s, something was happening: people were forgetting the damage that celebrating unrestrained wealth had done the last time it was allowed to dominate American politics. That’s when Lewis Powell delivered his infamous “Powell Memo” in 1971, a corporate call to arms urging the wealthiest Americans to seize control of the media, academia, Congress and the judiciary, public opinion, and the political system itself.

It worked. And over the following decades — with the morbidly rich funding right-wing think tanks, engineering media consolidation, and pouring rivers of dark money into our political system — America once again drifted back toward the worship of wealth as a sort of near-divine wisdom. We thus elected a corrupt, felonious billionaire to the presidency, twice.

Every time we let the morbidly rich take the wheel, our nation veers off the road.

Part of the problem is psychological. Extreme wealth isolates people from reality. Studies on the wealthy show declining empathy, reduced capacity to recognize others’ emotions, and a dangerous overconfidence in their own intuition. 

Research on CEOs finds that around 20 percent exhibit psychopathic traits — lack of empathy, superficial charm, impulsivity — compared to about one percent of the public. These aren’t qualities that make for wise leadership, but they do let people crawl over the bodies and lives of others to make themselves rich and powerful. 

They also can make for headline-grabbing blunders, cruel policies, and breathtakingly stupid decisions insulated from consequence only by inherited wealth and an army of sycophants.

And as I wrote in yesterday’s Hartmann Report about the “Great Secession of the Morbidly Rich,” once wealth reaches a certain scale it becomes indistinguishable from hoarding disorder. Billionaires don’t just accumulate money: they stockpile influence, lawmakers, media platforms, even entire political movements. They withdraw from the common good, then blame the rest of us for the social and infrastructure instability their own excesses have created.

The truth is that America has always been at its strongest when it remembers that great nations are built by great communities, not great fortunes. When we measure character by contribution, not by bank balance. When we demand guardrails, boundaries, and democratic accountability for everyone, especially those with the most power to do the most harm.

The morbidly rich won’t police themselves. They never have. It thus falls to the rest of us to stop confusing wealth with wisdom, and to stop granting automatic deference to people who’ve shown us, over and over again, that riches are no guarantee of intelligence, judgment, or moral clarity. 

If we forget that lesson again, they’ll be more than happy to remind us…at our expense.

Posted in America, Economics, government, inequality, politics, Republican Party | Tagged | Leave a comment

Trump briefed this week on options for military operations in Venezuela

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

TBPR Editor Asks: Is there anything Trump can do to take headlines from imminent news about his part in Epstein’s crimes? See Answer Below:

CNN.Com/By Kevin Liptak, Zachary Cohen and Jim Sciutto/November 14, 202

 

 

President Donald Trump was briefed this week on options for military operations inside Venezuela as he continues to mull a path forward in the country, four sources told CNN.

Trump has yet to decide on how to proceed, and he continues to weigh the risks and benefits of launching a scaled-up campaign. The president has previously voiced reservations about taking military action meant to oust Nicolas Maduro, concerned about whether it would prove effective.

While Wednesday’s briefing included an updated set of options for the president to consider, it did not indicate that he’s closer to making a decision, one of the people said. Another source familiar with the briefing said the options were similar to those that have been discussed within the Pentagon, and some publicly reported, in recent weeks.

President Donald Trump was briefed this week on options for military operations inside Venezuela as he continues to mull a path forward in the country, four sources told CNN.

Trump has yet to decide on how to proceed, and he continues to weigh the risks and benefits of launching a scaled-up campaign. The president has previously voiced reservations about taking military action meant to oust Nicolas Maduro, concerned about whether it would prove effective.

While Wednesday’s briefing included an updated set of options for the president to consider, it did not indicate that he’s closer to making a decision, one of the people said. Another source familiar with the briefing said the options were similar to those that have been discussed within the Pentagon, and some publicly reported, in recent weeks.



Photo by Somchai Kongkamsri on Pexels.com
Posted in America, crime, democracy, Donald Trump, foreign policy, government, military, politics, scandals, Venezuela, war | Tagged | Leave a comment

Betrayal. And Is Trump’s $2,000 “Dividend” Just a Corrupt Plan to Buy Votes?

Posted on November 10, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

The $2,000 “dividend” plan may be the boldest attempt yet to turn democracy into a cash-for-votes transaction…

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ November 10, 2025

Democrats swept the off-year elections, Trump’s popularity is sliding. The Democratic Party seems on the rise. It makes no sense to stop the momentum and give the Republicans a way out of their mess. The Democratic Party needs new leadership and a better strategy to regain approval from voters. This is not the way to do it. –The TBPR Editor

Before I get into today’s story, last night was an absolute effing disaster. Eight Democratic-caucus senators sold us out by voting with the Republicans: 

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Angus King (I-ME), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Tim Kaine (D-VA). 

And you know none of this could’ve happened without Chuck Schumer agreeing to it. The Vice-Chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressman Ro Khanna (a regular on my program) was blunt, saying Schumer “is no longer effective and should be replaced.”

I agree.

None of the eight are up for reelection next year (two are retiring), so Schumer and they figure over the course of the next several years we’ll forget what they did to us last night.

I, for one, have no intention of forgetting. 

Trump will say that now “even the Democrats agree” with him and he was “right all along.” Over a month of brutal pain was inflicted on the American people, and now he’ll claim it was “all the Democrats’ fault” and “they finally came to their senses.”

They’re already crowing across rightwing media. Look at the damage those heartless Democrats did to our food, healthcare premiums, and air travel! Remember this next November: if they regain the House or Senate they’ll stick it to the American people again just like they did over the past month! See how dangerous it is to vote for Democrats? They just can’t be trusted.

If you want to call any of these fools and cowards, the number for the Senate switchboard is 202-224-3121. Bernie Sanders, who called this “a policy and political disaster,” added:

And Senator Chris Murphy wrote:

“There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened tonight. And my fear is that Trump gets stronger, not weaker, because of this acquiescence. I’m angry – like you. But I choose to keep fighting.“

California governor Newsome called it “pathetic”; Illinois governor JB Pritzker said: “This is not a deal — it’s an empty promise.” 

I don’t know who is paid off (Fetterman?) or simply wimped out (Durbin/Schumer?), but this is right up there with Sinema and Manchin stabbing America in the back three years ago on the legislation to kill Citizens United and pass the John Lewis Voting Right Act to make voting a right rather than a privilege.

Both pieces of good legislation died because two corrupt on-the-take Democrats joined the Republicans. And here we are again.

Meanwhile, is Donald Trump also trying to buy the 2026 or the 2028 elections with a $2,000 check? 

He’s extremely pissed off that voters (and the media and even the Federal Reserve) noticed that his tariffs are driving up inflation. 

He’s also raging that the Democrats are getting credit for fighting for the little guy by wanting to extend/renew the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare) subsidies in exchange for voting with Republicans to reopen the government, although it looks like he might’ve just won that one.

This weekend, after his second debauchery party in the ballroom where he’d stored national security secrets for Russian and Chinese spies to rummage through, he postedto his Nazi-infested social media site:

“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS! … A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”

Forget the inflation, the serially-bankrupt con-man says it’s a “con job” when Democrats talk about “affordability”:

“What the Democrats do is, they lie. We are the ones that have done great on affordability. They’ve done horribly on affordability. We just lost an election, they said, based on affordability. It’s a con job by the Democrats.”

Please ignore, in other words, that his tariffs are openly unconstitutional (the Founders explicitly wrote that only Congress can impose tariffs). And, they’re driving inflation sky-high. 

And don’t even mention that Trump’s been using them to strong-arm foreign governments and their leaders into giving his sons billions for their crypto businesses and putting up Trump-branded hotels and golf courses where he risks nothing whatsoever but takes a continuous slice of the revenues as “licensing fees.”

Not to mention how they’re throwing the nation into recession at the same time they’re driving up the cost of everything, a pain that’s going to get really visible as we hit the holiday gift-buying season. 

And forget about the fact that your health insurance premiums are exploding in your face, as he also ranted:

“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over.”

In other words, let’s also get rid of the protections of the ACA — for example, the requirement that they must cover payment for chronic or preexisting conditions — and force every American to buy insurance (if they can afford it) from those same insurance companies he’s pretending to rage against. It’ll be a huge boon for the companies and their morbidly rich executives.

In exchange for screwing Americans on tariff-caused inflation and healthcare, he wants to send us a check just like he did with the Covid stimulus checks back in 2020, thinking putting his signature on them would help him win the upcoming election. 

His promise of a “dividend” to every citizen isn’t economic policy, it’s a proposed payoff. After five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized the practice of billionaires buying politicians and judges, Trump’s now cutting out the middlemen and proposing to buy the voters himself.

The tariffs (and his assaults on democracy) were hurting him with the voters enough to affect the election this month, driving a Democratic sweep across the nation. And now he’s also freaked out because his Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill gutted the ACA subsidies that made health insurance affordable for at least 24 million Americans and Democrats dared (until last night) stand up against it. 

Trump voters are experiencing buyer’s remorse and Americans more generally are furious that he and his billionaire buddies are screwing us while they live the Great Gatsby life. 

Thus, he’s now waving cash in our faces, believing we’re stupid enough to trade our democracy, economy, and healthcare for a quick hit of cash.

But this isn’t generosity; it’s corruption in broad daylight, a desperate, cynical attempt to turn the American vote into a cash transaction. 

The only question left is: how many Americans will take the bait? 

Posted in America, Congress, democracy, Democratic Party, Donald Trump, economy, health care, politics, Republican Party | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Atrocity Loop

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Arlen Grossman

 Is America Finding New Ways to Justify the Unthinkable?

From eugenics and AIDS denial to border kidnappings, the same cold logic endures: if the victims suffer enough, the powerful can call it order…

By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ November 7, 2025

America has always been proud of its ingenuity: our capacity to invent, to innovate, to solve. But among our most consistent inventions is one we never admit to but the Trump administration is now proudly highlighting: the machinery of cruelty. 

Generation after generation, we refine it, disguise it, and call it something noble: “law and order,” “family values,” “national security.” Each era congratulates itself for its moral progress while quietly perfecting the tools of human suffering. 

From the actuarial tables that justified the deaths of Black people a hundred years ago, to the silence that let gay men die in the 1980s, to the unmarked vans prowling our streets today, the design remains the same. The faces change; the purpose — upholding straight white male supremacy — never does.

While many Americans are shocked by the cruelty and brutality of Trump’s/Miller’s/Vance’s ICE and CPB thugs against Hispanics in the United States, such attempts to “purify” the country are really nothing new. Hopefully, though, our response to them will be different this time.

One of the most shocking things I learned when I was writing The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Richwas how much American policy was driven by white men in power who were trying to decrease the Black population, both by deportations, like James Monroe tried, and through actually genocidal domestic healthcare policies.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the vice president of Prudential Insurance, Frederick L. Hoffman, published a widely cited “scientific” book claiming that Black people were so biologically inferior that they would “eventually die out.” He argued that if white society simply refused to extend medical care, social support, or public health infrastructure to them, their extinction would “occur naturally.” 

It was an extraordinary act of pseudoscientific cruelty: a man with corporate and political power using the language of statistics and medicine to rationalize genocide by neglect. Hoffman’s 1896 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro — one of the best-selling books of the early 1900s — became the actuarial and intellectual foundation for denying healthcare to Black Americans to this day, giving white policymakers cover to block public health investment while claiming to be guided by “data.”

Hoffman’s claim is why there’s a 20% hole in traditional Medicare: it was created at the demand of white racist southern senators so elderly Black people — who couldn’t afford the 20% co-pay — wouldn’t show up in then-whites-only hospitals and doctors’ offices.

That same brutal logic — intentional genocide by state action or inaction — reappeared when the AIDS crisis erupted in the 1980s. The Reagan administration’s response to the disease was defined by silence and contempt. As tens of thousands of mostly gay men got sick and died (several of them close friends of ours), America’s bigoted President Reagan refused even to utter the word “AIDS” throughout his presidency.

— His press secretary laughed, from the official White House podium, about gay men dying . 

— Conservative pundits like Pat Buchanan called the disease “nature’s retribution” for “immoral” homosexuality, and Senator Jesse Helms successfully banned federal funding for educational materials about safe sex and AIDS that he said might “promote homosexual activity.” 

— William F. Buckley Jr. (who also wrote about the supposed genetic inferiority of Black people) proposed tattooing people who had AIDS so they could be identified, discriminated against, and segregated from the rest of us. 

The message from Republicans in power was unmistakable: the queer victims of HIV were morally defective, they deserved their excruciatingly painful deaths, and government had no duty to save them. 

It was Hoffman’s calculus all over again, dressed up in the language of religion and “family values” instead of racial eugenics.

Now that same monstrous pattern is repeating itself both along our border and border towns, as well as across the interior of the United States. The logic of white racial and cultural superiority reflected by Republican rhetoric has today metastasized into open brutality.

The so-called Kavanaugh stops — made possible by a morally evil shadow-docket ruling written by Brett Kavanaugh for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — have effectively given Trump’s agents permission to seize and detain people based solely on the color of their skin or the way they speak, just like the Klan could do in the Old South. 

Under this blatantly unconstitutional decree, masked federal goons can snatch anyone they choose, hold them without due process, and claim they’re “immigration suspects.” There are already reports of U.S. citizens, including fathers and mothers driving their kids to school, being pulled from their cars, cuffed, and dragged away by men in black or camo tactical gear with no badges and no warrants. 

One video shows a terrified child screaming as her father — a US citizen, brutalized in broad daylight — is shoved into an unmarked van, because he looked Hispanic. They then kidnapped the terrorized child and held her for much of the day. 

This is not law enforcement. It’s state terror. As Adam Serwer famously wrote, “The cruelty is the point.” Stephen Miller and his colleagues in the Trump White House appear to have designed these policies precisely to maximize fear and suffering.

During Trump’s first term he bragged to colleagues that family separation worked as “deterrence.” Children were warehoused in cages, parents deported without them, and about a thousand have vanished to this day through a shadowy network of pop-up “Christian” foster homes that vanished after they got the kids from the Trump administration. 

The trauma was — and is — intentional, an explicit message to would-be brown-skinned migrants that America would destroy their families if they came here. Now Trump, et al, are expanding that same logic nationwide, empowered by corrupt white Republicans on a Supreme Court that has abandoned the Constitution in favor of hateful, bigoted ideology and obedience to the party that appointed them.

What we’re witnessing right now is the third great chapter in a grim American tradition: define a population as “lesser,” withhold or weaponize care, legalize and expand harassment, and watch the consequences unfold — people brutalized, children traumatized, citizens terrified — while pretending they’re inevitable and the cause is noble. 

Hoffman’s statistical analyses justified abandoning Black Americans to early death by refusing them healthcare. Reagan’s silence and cuts to government funds allowed a generation of gay men to die untreated. And Trump’s immigration machine now turns suffering into policy. 

In each case, the people inflicting the harm claim moral superiority — that they’re protecting the “real” America from impurity or invasion — while what they’re really doing is institutionalizing cruelty and brutality as governance while being cheered on by their bigoted white supremacist base.

This is not hyperbole. When a Supreme Court packed with rightwing ideologues uses an unsigned opinion to strip away constitutional rights and green-light racial profiling, we’re no longer operating under a system that respects equal protection under the law. 

When federal agents are masked, unmarked, unaccountable, and armed, snatching US citizens and peaceful protestors off the street, we’re living in a police state. And when our national conversation treats all that as normal, we’re back in Hoffman’s world; the world where suffering isn’t an error to be corrected but a strategy for how the powerful maintain straight white male supremacy.

We have to call this what it is: cultural — and sometimes physical — genocide by design. Hoffman’s eugenics, Reagan’s homophobic hate, and Trump’s xenophobia are all the same disease in different generations. 

They rely on public apathy, and on the willingness of good people to look away. Each time, the target group changes, but the mechanism remains: withhold care, strip rights, justify suffering, and declare it “justice” for straight white men and a society that claims they should exclusively be in charge.

The outrage of the Kavanaugh stops isn’t just about immigration or policing. It’s about whether the United States still recognizes limits on government power. 

It’s immoral. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic evil that once hid behind actuarial tables and “family values.” Rightwing leaders in past fascist regimes have used it to justify the wholesale destruction of a people.

We must not let history repeat itself again. We know where this road leads: to children in cages, to communities terrorized, to hospitals turning patients away, to families burying their dead while officials shrug. 

Hoffman — a Republican who openly celebrated the death of FDR — thought Black extinction would come naturally if white men in power simply withheld care. Reagan thought the gay community would vanish if government refused to help. And Trump’s America First ideologues continue to argue that nonwhite people will “self-deport” if the state makes life unbearable enough as they welcome white South Africans. 

In every case, the goal is erasure of “undesirable people” through pain.

We have the power to stop it, but only if we refuse to normalize it. Every senator, every judge, every journalist, every citizen must confront the reality that the machinery of cruelty is running again in our names. 

Once a nation accepts pain as governance, democracy becomes performance and compassion becomes treason. Republicans have perfected the unthinkable. The only question left is whether America will finally refuse to justify it.

Silence is complicity. Outrage is the only moral response, and action the only cure. Tag, you’re it!

Posted in America, democracy, Donald Trump, extremism, government, law enforcement, politics, protest, Republican Party, scandals | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments