NOVEMBER 9TH, 2022

‘Boebert called a man born and raised in Montrose County a groomer – a term for a person who sexually abuses children. The remark, directed at Don Coram, a conservative Republican and rancher whose son happens to be gay, is just one example of Boebert’s casual yet crass cruelty.’

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She lost. Finally.

‘Our country — in the grip of a vengeful, Constitution-shredding president and his inner circle of sadistic stooges and rapacious tech allies — was becoming unrecognizable to us and to our former friends around the world…

Trump called female reporters “piggy,” “ugly” and “stupid.” Both Trump and Vance hurled bigoted insults at Abdul El-Sayed about his Muslim faith; Trump called him a “jihadist” and “Mohammed,” and Vance called him “very, very evil.” Hegseth offered a list of soldiers he doesn’t want, saying, “no fatties, no trannies.”’

‘For Republican candidates and campaigners this cycle, cruelty became almost a central campaign tactic. Many of them struggled to mount a serious policy case, and found themselves stuck with a historically unpopular president as party leader, so they fell back on the tried-and-true maneuver of beating up on the weak, hoping it would work as well as it seemed to throughout the Trump era.

“People are craving decency, especially given the cruelty that this president governs with.” (Andy Beshear)

“[The notorious campaign ad] could be an all-time backfire for Ramaswamy — and it raises the possibility that Trump and Vance will also suffer politically for rushing to defend it.” (Sarah Longwell)’

‘During his now-infamous interview with CBS News, Donald Trump admitted that he hates his foes with so much fury that he wouldn’t even forgive them in order to get into Heaven. “I do hate some of my enemies,” he said, “and I always will.” Trump’s expression of unquenchable rage has caused widespread consternation among leading Christian figures, including his supporters. Writer Rod Dreher lamented that “he hates his enemies more than he fears God.” Pastor Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump backer, indirectly asked whether Trump has repented sufficiently to avoid Hell. Another backer worried that “Trump is not a Christian.”’

Next thing you know you’ll tell us George Soros doesn’t have cloven hooves.

Caps mine.

It’s kinda on the tragicomic side. You got people who can’t act rationally, who can’t compromise, because their commitment to a particular political issue is immovable – based as it is on inerrant biblical truth. It’s like public executions, or women’s suffrage: the bible says yes on one and no on the other and that’s that. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Then there’s everybody else. Many people have no trouble with some restrictions on abortion, but because they are not religious fanatics, they are, broadly speaking, supportive of the right to choose. Americans “overwhelmingly backed pro-abortion rights ballot measures and candidates Tuesday night.” The blue wave was a powerful pro-choice wave.

The big exception was Idaho, Land of Shining White Supremacy. Get thee hence. Read down to End Notes.

Wowsa.

Hyperaffluence, and hyperinequality, generate some fascinating social pathologies in these United States. When lots of people here have tens of millions, up to billions, in personal wealth, it tends to make them arrogant to the point of sadism. Hence my term the Sado-state; hence William I. Robinson’s term, “sadistic capitalism” — both are efforts to capture the escalating cruelification of our country’s money and governing elites. Not just master sadist Donald Trump, of course, but his important allies and appointees: V. Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, John N. Kennedy — all of them easily diagnosed as what Freudians would call sub-clinical paraphilic coercives.

 Perverted money viciousness goes way back – recall the pre-revolutionary French court – but our inconceivably rich country has been generating its own particular forms of this depravity. In 2014, for instance, a reporter snuck into an ultra-private dress party for the financier members of a club called Kappa Beta Phi, where, not long after the national financial collapse, the partygoers reveled in the pain many of them had caused.

[V]eteran Kappas … gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously [while ridiculing] the real harm [they caused] to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis… [A] group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009 [was] laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (One of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street.

In sadistic capitalism, the suffering and deprivation generated become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others, says Robinson; it’s as if the very effrontery of being an ordinary person with ordinary life struggles immediately qualifies you for brutal blows. Just as importantly, the very fact of having successfully exploited the American economy to an obscene degree now elevates you to a position of sadistic overlord, like the head of Oracle, who simply bought up many houses in a development near his estate and deposited his extensive personal staff in them. Established homeowners there, unaccustomed to thinking of their community as a feudal settlement, complained, but could do nothing.

The Cruelty is the Point, Adam Serwer titles his recent book, and in titling it so, he underscores the specific rough beast whose hour has come round. Although we have Ramaswamy’s attack ad to thank for prompting a national conversation about sadism, there is so much more to be said.

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For instance:

Vance’s bet is that the US is an isolationist country with white nationalist sentiments; that it will punish foreign wars and high prices and reward racism. But what the results of the midterms show is that the US is a pluralist country with a limited appetite for public cruelty…

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It’s like… Imagine a bunch of Trumpist operatives sitting around a table and discussing this Atlantic article, whose subtitle reads

SOME MIDTERM VOTERS MAY HAVE BEEN

DRIVEN TO REPUDIATE CRUELTY.

Uh-oh! Preliminary thoughts, people?

Yeah. We’re fucked.

Why?

Well haha you know the Latin. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you seek our monument, look around you. Sadistic politicians inspired by sadistic Trump. Sadistic policies. It’s what we do. It’s what we are.

Can we change?

What? You mean undergo the Ludovico Technique? Do you see the lengths they take to program Alex out of the ecstasy of viciousness? For our lot, it’s orgasmically intense, hurting other people. I don’t see us changing.

Maybe find a new, kinder, leader?

All possible Trump successors are younger, more energetic, bestials.

In short, we’re fucked?

Yup.

Naught’s so foul, that on the earth doth live, as frat foul.

Maybe Bret Stephens is right. Maybe Vance is trying to blame it on the Jews.

Me, I just recalled the one group of Americans Vance has always singled out as the source of our national failures – “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” I assumed he’d blame them for the blue wave.

Maybe Vance meant to say “Jewish childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

… black Senator? Heads up, y’all! Get a load of them Ole Miss students doing monkey grunts right on camera!

Oh no wait I made a mistake. That footage was back in 2013 when about 400 Ole Miss dudes were super-pissed that a black guy got elected president. What a fuss they made! Burned his pic! Also on camera.

No, this latest one was a bunch of Ole Miss missies being racist just tuther day. Hard to keep up.

Massie’s statement is one for the ages.

What have the two old college friends been up to since the recent Series of Unfortunate Events?

They’ve been up to their old tricks, the rascals!

‘[In a video circulating online, a] man sits on the ground with his sweatpants on fire. He then lunges at a second person and tackles him. The second man’s clothing also catches fire, and they both roll on the ground removing their clothes as several onlookers intervene. One appears to be holding a small fire extinguisher…

Columbus [Ohio] Police Sgt. Joe Albert said it appears the matter took place on Saturday.’

Although the two men have not yet been identified, many believe they are the VP and Ramaswamy, whose friendship, starting at Yale, has always been based on shared sadomasochism.

…. AND on removing the right of women to vote. Wilson is too modest in his list of reasons for the Republican defeat. He owes it to himself to remind reporters that while he has tried to destroy voting rights for women, MAGA has largely ignored him. Until the movement answers this biblically-grounded call (and not forgetting the call to criminalize pornography and heavily promote public executions), it will continue to rot in the hell of God’s disfavor.

The heroic Poles who took down the Krakow mass murderer. Both are in critical condition.

… It virtually guarantees a greater likelihood of dementia.