Christopher Hitchens writes about George Orwell and the common capacity for / effort toward ethical and intellectual integrity.

Democracy’s keenest enemies are willfully ignorant and fanatical cultists, most vividly on display in America’s covid-indifferent, Trump-besotted ultraorthodox Jewish communities. No demographic in this country will have higher Trump vote totals. As in Israel, if you want to chart the decline of democratic instincts and institutions, there’s no better place than in the heart of this withdrawn, uneducated, law-flouting, and violent group. Herd obedience to authoritarian religious leaders means it will deliver, today, a virtually solid Trump vote.

As the returns from all over America come in, let us see if reason, civic sentiment, and morality can triumph over passion, indifference to the public realm, and cruelty.

Led by women (lots of that going around – look at Belarus), the angry citizens of Poland confront their own Mad Trump with the biggest challenge to his power yet.

… every single line twice. Out loud. Usually I’d excerpt the most important bits. It’s all important.

You subject us for years to large posters showing aborted fetuses; we subject you to large posters showing crucified pregnant women.

[T]he national defense strategy of the United States is built on the unstated assumption that the American people will not allow a lunatic to become president... Compelling evidence suggests that [Donald Trump’s] countless sins and defects are rooted in mental instability, pathological narcissism, and profound moral and cognitive impairment… Donald Trump … is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule.

Hitchens told France, long ago, how your country gets to a place where its teachers of free speech are beheaded in school courtyards, in front of crowds of children.

What happens to children who watch a man film their headless civics teacher, in order to delight Islamists and terrify secular France with it?

In time, the French Rate My Teacher app will feature, alongside “hotness,” a beheaded body emoji.

This much we know: It is always too late to take seriously the statements that religious fundamentalists make. They tell you until they’re blue in the face that they will kill people who act on their belief in the freedom of speech. Y’all just think they’re joshing.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for years,” Iannis Roder, a historian and teacher, told French radio. “I hope this is a turning point in recognising the reality of what happens on the ground.”

I fear it’s too late for any turning point.

Barbarism:

1. absence of culture and civilization.”the collapse of civilization and the return to barbarism”

2. extreme cruelty or brutality.”she called the execution an act of barbarism”

Who the fuck is France letting in to its country? Why?

‘Vermeule is confident that his fellow Americans will eventually learn to love theocracy:

Subjects [writes Vermeule] will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.’

I dread very deeply the idea of this tormented soul remaining at the head of the country for another three months. I find some relief in Nancy Pelosi just now having announced that she and her colleagues will discuss the 25th amendment tomorrow. I actually think we run the risk that Mr Trump’s mania combined with his rage will prompt him to kill himself. That will certainly be a first. The first American president to kill himself while in office. “After watching the interview, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Trump has come completely undone.”

Pelosi spoke after Trump was interviewed on Fox Business Network in a frenzied almost hour-long interview where he suggested Gold Star families may have infected him with COVID, claimed again he was ‘cured,’ equivocated over whether he is still on powerful steroids, demanded AG Bill Barr indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama and twice called Kamala Harris a ‘monster.’

Sing it, brother.

UD has been against debates – you don’t debate a lying ranting paranoid.

UD didn’t watch tonight. All the reactions she’s gathered – beginning with Mr UD’s and then the media’s – vindicate her. Masochists and nihilists who want to watch yet another venerable American tradition be shredded to shit in front of their eyes might have enjoyed this; they might enjoy the anticipation of two more identical events. The rest of us should hope that Pelosi’s common sense will now prevail.

******

Pelosi’s rolling her eyes. Why didn’t anyone listen to her?

******

[W]hat we had was Trump ranting, visibly angry, launching off on numerous digressions, lying. It was ugly, unhinged and exhausting – a good summary of Trump’s entire presidency.

******

“What a dark event we have just witnessed.”

Okay, so UD wants to issue an apology, a mea culpa, whatever, to Bandy X. Lee and other psychiatrists who were out in front months ago warning about Trump’s dangerous mental instability, and indeed calling for some form of congressional intervention in the situation before … before a nation had to watch a shit show that “scared America.”

They were right.

[I]t is to the good of the whole, as well as to the interest of the individual, that everyone, who can, sets himself down to his business, and contributes his quota of taxes. [It] is one of the first duties he owes to his family, to himself, and to his country. Every amusement ought to be dispensed with, every indulgence curtailed, and every possible economy practiced, both public and private, until a revenue sufficient for the protection and good of the country is obtained, and the debt to public justice satisfied.

We are the heirs of Thomas Paine. We will find our way back to him.

It’s time. Violence-fomenting aspiring fascists who refuse peaceful transfer of power: We’re back in the Second World War; and it’s time to dust off its songs, alter them a bit, and SING.

When the lights go on again all over this land

And we have our victory all over this land

Then we will work together to rebuild the polity we almost killed

The sadist’s going home —  we couldn’t be more thrilled

When the lights go on again all over this land

And we ship our fascist pols far far from this land

Then our democracy will find its wings and free hearts will sing

When the lights go on again all over this land

Yeah? And? Is that so horrible? Haven’t you been rolling around in your mind this week the announcement that Bezos now has a personal fortune of well over two hundred billion dollars? UD has been rolling it around in her mind. Cuz… I dunno. It ain’t sitting right…

Even Steve Cohen’s paltry thirteen billion ain’t sitting right…

Yet

if a [presidential] candidate were to go the full Piketty—by proposing enormous taxes on the rich and taking steps toward surrendering [national] sovereignty to a transnational socialistic union—do we really think that nativism and nationalism would retreat, rather than redouble? Would erstwhile supporters of Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and Geert Wilders evolve beyond their fears of Muslim migration and accept the new utopia?

***************

Anyway. However you feel about Piketty’s proposals, you have to admire his refusal to be censored by radically unequal China. Think of all the copies of his latest book he could sell there. But he won’t, because he’s a man of principle. Bravo.

… that under the grotesquerie of Trump lay the ordinariness and decency of the American majority. She didn’t need the roll call video (start at 7:37) to tell her that. But it’s fun to watch.