Trump's Violent Fantasies

Donald Trump is back to his habit of fantasizing about the government (under his leadership) using illegal violence against criminals, immigrants, and/or political opponents. I blogged about this in 2019 when he was in office. I also compiled references to his violent rhetoric dating to the start of his first campaign in 2015 through 2019.

A couple of days ago in Erie, PA, Trump said something that sounded like the plot for "The Purge." It imagined a whole new level of violence:

"You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day," he said, during a section of the speech about how left-wing politicians are allegedly preventing police from enforcing the law, "one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll end immediately."

Trump defenders say that the former president was speaking "in jest," but it didn't seem like a joke (watch below) and is entirely consistent with comments he has made over the years. Plus, populists employing similar authoritarian rhetoric have actually empowered death squads in various countries around the world. In the Philippines, for example, 1000s of people were killed by the police during a war on drugs and crime authorized by a newly elected populist right-wing president. A similar pattern emerged in Brazil in 2019 where the police killed 17 people per day, on average. 

In those deaths, the police act as judge, jury, and executioner. So much for constitutional protections like due process of law and prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. How is it conservative to abandon the bill of rights? 

If you want to skip straight to the quoted message in the video below, you cannot, because Trump starts with "one real rough, nasty day" around 2:15, gets off-track with a made-up anecdote about Kamala Harris (referencing a decriminalization law signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger years before Harris was elected to state or national office), and then around 3:25 into the video mentions "one rough hour, and I mean real rough." The first few minutes ramble through some complaints about debate moderators and some made-up stuff about crime. He criticizes statistics, though candidate Trump often references (made up or out-of-date) statistics to support his points.

That last linked article from the Washington Post notes that crime statistics have been in general decline since the 1990s, but did spike in 2020, Trump's final year of office (during the pandemic). Crime stats remained a bit high until 2022, but have declined substantially since then. 

 

Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

1895 murders

Well.

I'll follow you. Send me a message; we'll try to follow up.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) November 5, 2018

This website from the town briefly mentions the crimes, which occurred December 30, 1895. In my family tree, I've seen McFadden spelled numerous ways, including McFadzean, McFadyn, etc.

Update: I finished the book and now realize that the murder in my family pre-dates the crimes James studies. Since he identifies a suspect based on an alleged initial murder, then it would not appear that this crime was committed by the same killer. However, the crime is very similar to many of the crimes discussed in the book.


Visit this blog's homepage.

For 280 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Transparency in the Future

I found this unsettling paragraph in a stack of dusty material meant for this blog. It's from a May 2011 Jackson Lears review of three Sam Harris books, including his well-known (and best-selling, which is redundant, I suppose) The End of Faith: Religion, Terror & the Future of Reason (2004).

Convinced that brain science has located the biological sources of “bias”—the areas of the brain that cause us to deviate from the norms of factual and moral reasoning—[Sam] Harris predicts that this research will lead to the creation of foolproof lie detectors. He does not say how these devices will be deployed. Will they be worn on the body, implanted in the brain, concealed in public locations? What he does say is that they will be a great leap forward to a world without deception—which, we must understand, is one of the chief sources of evil. “Whether or not we ever crack the neural code, enabling us to download a person’s private thoughts, memories, and perceptions without distortion,” he declares, the detectors will “surely be able to determine, to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and perceptions honestly in conversation.” (As always, the question arises, who are “we”?) Technology will create a brave new world of perfect transparency, and legal scholars who might worry about the Fifth Amendment implications are being old-fashioned.

Sounds like something that could appear in a Philip K. Dick story.


Note: This is NOT in reference to the famous Sam Harris who was my high school classmate.


Visit this blog's homepage.

For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.