Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (executed by the Nazis in 1945) argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless as all attempts at reason fall on deaf ears.
https://youtu.be/ww47bR86wSc
Trump's Surprising Popularity in Prison.
Many incarcerated white people said they'd re-elect the ***FORMER*** president—if given the chance.
Before prison, John Adkins, 43, didn’t care about politics. He watched the news regularly but said he mostly wanted to see reports about the ongoing gang violence in Southwest Detroit, where he lived. Now, after 23 years in a Michigan prison for murder, Adkins is an ardent Republican and supporter of Donald Trump.
The Marshall Project partnered with Slate to conduct the first-of-its-kind political survey of prisons and jails across the country. Read more about how prison can change your political outlook, what individuals had to say and how one man became politically engaged in Louisiana’s Angola prison. Here's more on how we did it.
He credits conservative media for his political education. In prison, Adkins began watching the news again but soon grew sick of “the demonization of straight, white, Christian men on CNN and MSNBC and just about all mainstream media,” he wrote, using the email system at Macomb Correctional Facility, where he is incarcerated. So he found himself drawn to right-wing shows such as “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The hosts’ positions on key issues such as abortion (against) and gay marriage (also against) won him over. But above all, Adkins says, he identifies as a conservative because he feels under attack by the left.“I am so tired of the double-standard of the left in the country,” Adkins wrote.
“Their rhetoric is what is divisive in this country, not Donald J. Trump’s!”It is widely believed that the majority of people in prison are Democrats—and some Republicans who oppose restoring voting rights for released prisoners have expressed fears that they would vote Democratic. Black people, who consistently favor Democrats, are in fact overrepresented in prisons. Although white people are 64 percent of the total population, they only account for 39 percent of people in state prisons.In a first-of-its-kind political survey of the incarcerated, The Marshall Project and Slate found that a significant share of white respondents called themselves Republicans and would vote to reelect Trump in 2020—if given the chance. Forty-five percent of white respondents backed Trump, about 30 percent picked among Democratic candidates, and the remaining 25 percent said they did not know or would not vote.The survey is the most comprehensive snapshot of currently incarcerated people’s politics to date, but it has limitations.
Respondents skewed whiter than the overall prison population, and many respondents are incarcerated in red states. As a result, it is not representative of the overall prison population. Instead of only focusing on the respondents as a whole, we looked for trends across race, gender, and other demographic differences to ensure our reported results were meaningful.
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Trump’s Surprising Support in Prison.
Americans behind bars tell us why they love the president.
Inside prison, reasons for supporting Trump vary. Some of the reasons reflect the particular circumstances of prison life: Most prisoners share a cell, making it difficult to tune out conservative cellmates or right-wing media, or to even control which channel is on. Prisons are also notoriously segregated and can be a breeding ground for white nationalists.
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Trump made it easier for the mentally ill to get guns when he rolled back Obama regulation.
In 2017, Trump quietly rolled back an Obama-era regulation that made it harder for people with mental illness to buy guns.
President Donald Trump responded to the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings by insisting Monday that “mental illness pulls the trigger not the gun,” but shortly after taking office he quietly rolled back an Obama-era regulation that would have made it harder for people with mental illness to buy guns.
Trump did so without any fanfare. In fact, the news that Trump had signed the bill was at the bottom of a White House email that alerted the media to other legislation signed by the president.
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The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists.
Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it.
The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.
One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.* Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejected the American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline, known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”
Lee recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole. These insights are now taking on renewed importance as a growing number of current and former leaders call for Trump to be impeached. On January 9 Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition put out a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office.
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In February 2016, when Donald Trump was merely one of several contenders for the Republican U.S. presidential nomination (and still considered something of a longshot), he surprised many pundits by winning the preponderance of delegates in three straight contests: the New Hampshire primary, the South Carolina primary, and the Nevada caucus.
Contemporaneous reporting of the latter contest noted that Trump did particularly well among "less educated voters":
Trump did well across the board in Nevada, garnering 45.9% of the vote, but he did even better among voters with a high school education or less. Fifty-seven percent of those voters supported him, according to entrance polls.
The next closest candidate among high-school-or-less voters was Ted Cruz, who had 20%.
That's a sizable gap of 37 percentage points.
Trump didn't just win with less educated voters ... he crushed it.
Trump promises power grabs and vengeance if he wins in 2024...
In the wake of this week’s terrifying news of the New York Times/Siena College polls showing Donald Trump beating President Joe Biden in must-win battleground states, keep in mind two words and spread them: Insurrection Act.
It’s been 31 years since a president last invoked the act and dispatched troops domestically to enforce federal law. That’s the longest stretch of nonuse in the Insurrection Act’s roughly 240-year history, befitting the disquieting power it confers.
But if Trump is reelected, the law’s next invocation could well come soon, on Jan. 20, 2025 — Inauguration Day.
Anticipating widespread protests against his second term, Trump and allies reportedly are drafting plans to invoke the Insurrection Act in his first hours back in the White House — thereby confirming the expected protesters’ likely point: Trump is a danger to liberty and constitutional governance.
And that’s just one of many MAGA plans in the works, as the Washington Post reported last week, all aimed at making good on Trump’s central promise of the 2024 campaign: “retribution.” (A third word to remember, and repeat.)
According to the Post, Trump allies — purported intellectuals and Cabinet wannabes in far-right think tanks — are “mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish [his] critics and opponents,” even naming individuals to be investigated and prosecuted.
Among the targets are some of the top appointees of Trump’s four years as president, who learned firsthand that he was and is unfit for office: John F. Kelly, the retired Marine general and Gold Star father who was White House chief of staff and Homeland Security secretary; former Atty. Gen. William Barr; retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, formerly the nation’s highest-ranking military officer as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and a passel of officials at the Justice Department and FBI. Oh, and he’s already told us he’ll “go after” Biden and his family.
The Post account builds on an earlier one in the New York Times about the “Project 2025” plan for a new Trump administration — er, autocracy. The newspaper’s report said Trump’s second-term objectives include taking control of independent agencies, including the Fed, that are meant to be free of political interference; impounding congressionally appropriated funds he doesn’t like; gutting the civil service and returning to the partisan 19th century “spoils system”; and purging the Defense, State and intelligence departments of disloyal officials — disloyal to Trump, that is.
As Tom Nichols, a national security analyst and former Republican, wrote in the Atlantic, what’s afoot are “plans for a dictatorship that should appall every American.”
Indeed, every American should be appalled. Yet nearly half of the electorate supports this would-be despot, polls show, including a CNN poll released Tuesday. But an unprecedented number of former presidential appointees all but implore us to never let their former boss darken the door of the Oval Office again.
We’re talking about former Pentagon and intelligence chiefs, other Cabinet secretaries, members of his White House inner circle — even his vice president!
Despite this, too many voters are disengaged, grumpy that their choice seems to be coming down to Trump vs. Biden. As if those choices were comparably distasteful when, in fact, one is vanilla and the other is nitroglycerin.
Trump, returned to the presidency, would sit at the apex of a government whose foundation is the rule of law. Yet his obnoxious outbursts this week in his New York civil trial over financial skulduggery were just the latest evidence of his disdain for the law and the judicial system. And we haven’t even gotten to his three criminal trials for seeking to overturn Biden’s election and making off with government documents. No one — not witnesses, prosecutors or judges — is immune from his attacks and the death threats that follow.
Then there’s the flip side of Trump’s promises of revenge: the rewards and pardons he’ll dispense to convicted Jan. 6 rioters and schemers, cronies in legal peril and, of course, himself. He’ll try, if there’s a next time, to make good on his past claim that under the Constitution’s Article 2, “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
As president, Trump was thwarted in his unhinged, unconstitutional and unethical impulses by those former administration officials he now assails. Kelly told the Post, “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”
Well, the folks at Project 2025 have that covered. They’re compiling names of thousands of potential appointees for a second Trump administration who are sure to be “conservative warriors.”
So what guardrails might protect us from Trump 2.0?
There is the military, which, as Milley made himself aware, can refuse an illegal order. The Insurrection Act, however, gives a president broad authority to order the military into action in this country.
There are the federal courts, which mostly served the republic well against Trump’s postelection scheming. There’s the Senate, given its power to confirm presidential appointees, though that’s a thin reed indeed given Republicans’ fealty to Trump.
The best guardrail is not electing Trump, period.
Repeat: Insurrection Act. Retribution. Because he’s warned us.
https://youtu.be/pvs6jnRndqo
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Prince of Darkness.
A group of graduate students and scientists uncover an ancient canister in an abandoned church, but when they open the container, they inadvertently unleash a strange swampy liquid and an evil force on all humanity.
As this film opens an elderly priest dies shortly before he was due to see his cardinal; in his possession is a key. This is passed on to a new priest; it unlocks a door to a basement which has, for several hundred years contained the imprisoned Satan! The priest believes the ancient evil is about to escape so invites Howard Birack, a professor of quantum physics, and his students to help investigate. The students are sceptical but strange things start to happen; homeless people, acting like zombies... (or magats)
"the liquid inside the container is the Devil or Anti-God or son of the Devil...."
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