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FOCUS: Psychiatrists Know What's Wrong With My Uncle. Let Them Tell Voters. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56769"><span class="small">Mary Trump, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Sunday, 25 October 2020 11:10 |
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Trump writes: "While psychiatric diagnosis is a technical process, it is entirely within bounds to draw conclusions based on observable behavior."
Donald Trump at a rally. (photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)
Psychiatrists Know What's Wrong With My Uncle. Let Them Tell Voters.
By Mary Trump, The Washington Post
25 October 20
Muzzling its members is a dereliction of duty by the American Psychiatric Association
 n 1964, Fact magazine published an unscientific survey asking psychiatrists whether they thought the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States. The problem wasn’t that professionals felt the need to share their views of what they considered Goldwater’s dangerous ideas; it was the irresponsible and often bizarre analyses that were in some cases based entirely on rank speculation. “Goldwater is basically a paranoid schizophrenic” who “resembles Mao Tse-tung,” one offered. Another said that he “has the same pathological make-up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders.” A third said that “a megalomaniacal, grandiose omnipotence appears to pervade Mr. Goldwater’s personality.”
Embarrassed, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), in reaction to this debacle, established the “Goldwater Rule,” which barred its members from diagnosing public figures. It concluded that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” That’s fair, as far as it goes. But in March 2017, shortly after my uncle, Donald Trump, was inaugurated, the APA didn’t just reaffirm the rule — it expanded it past the point of coherence. Not only were members prohibited from diagnosing public figures, now they could no longer offer a professional opinion of any sort, no matter how well supported or evidence-based, even if they believed that a public figure posed a threat to the country’s citizens or national security.
This is absurd on its face and has potentially serious consequences for the safety of the American people. While psychiatric diagnosis is a technical process, it is entirely within bounds to draw conclusions based on observable behavior. It is one thing to declare definitively that a person has anti-social personality disorder (a specific diagnostic term); it is another to point to behaviors — such as deliberately putting other people in harm’s way for no discernible reason (for example, abandoning our Kurdish allies) beyond one’s own self-interest — and express the general conclusion that it is dangerous to have somebody in the Oval Office who is incapable of empathy. The APA has also stated that “psychiatrists are medical doctors; evaluating mental illness is no less thorough than diagnosing diabetes or heart disease.” That’s true — but what might a cardiologist say if a public figure kept having heart attacks? Would he need to be subjected to a “thorough” diagnostic regimen for a doctor to speculate that there might be an underlying heart condition? If the person who kept having heart attacks was a pilot who refused to seek medical attention, wouldn’t it be malpractice not to speak out? It is not an exaggeration to say that Donald has exhibited pathological behavior that is equally alarming — as evidenced most recently by his callous disregard for his own health and the well-being of those around him when he left Walter Reed hospital while still shedding coronavirus, or when he holds rallies and encourages thousands of people to attend without wearing masks or social distancing in order to prop up his ego.
The American public is inadequately educated about mental health. It would take a serious, sustained explication, backed by the power and reach of a professional association, to help us understand why the emotional and psychological stability of our leaders matters and can have an impact on all of us. Every day legal experts weigh in on Donald’s unconstitutional or norm-breaking behaviors. Since his covid-19 diagnosis, medical experts have speculated about the course of his illness and the potentially dangerous side effects he may be experiencing as a result of the experimental treatments he’s received. Only the mental health experts have been effectively sidelined.
That doesn’t mean opinions haven’t proliferated about Donald’s mental health. It sometimes seems that everyone but psychiatrists has aired their views: Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, once described Donald’s behavior as “a combination of waking hallucinations, verbal tics, lies surpassing even his usual fabulist standard, aphasias and lunatic blurtings.”
This is a problem. Not necessarily because characterizations like this lack validity, but because such assessments can inadvertently undermine the seriousness of the case when experts fail to provide an appropriate context in which to understand the psychopathologies. If we look at the past 3½ years, Donald has lied publicly in excess of 20,000 times; he has impulsively, and against all reason, gone against the advice of experts who could have helped contain the pandemic and protect the economy; he has put private citizens at risk by attacking them on Twitter because they have criticized him; he has proved himself to be incapable of accepting responsibility, changing course or exhibiting empathy. As Courtney Fingar wrote recently in the New Statesman: “The public can observe all these things too, but does so largely without translation or explanation by actual experts. In the end, what was written as a rule to curb speculation has, in fact, allowed it to run rampant.”
Donald’s rhetoric and behavior do have an enormous impact on and play an outsize role in the day-to-day lives of more than 300 million Americans and more in the larger world. We are, in this respect, in a relationship with him, even if it is inevitably one-sided. While it is impossible to diagnose him in the technical sense — because diagnosis is a stringent process that requires certain steps to be followed and certain data to be collected in a very specific way — shifting our focus from the diagnosis to the impact that erratic, impulsive, psychologically disordered behavior can have on those in a relationship, no matter how one-sided or involuntary, is not just useful but necessary.
I am a trained clinical psychologist and have worked as a clinician. If Donald had walked into my office for an evaluation, I would have gathered less information about him from a normal intake interview than I could gather from the countless hours of video available from his decades in the public eye. Often when self-reports aren’t available — because the patient is either unable or unwilling to offer information — the clinician turns to those close to the patient in order to fill in the blanks. But none of that is necessary because examples of Donald’s disordered, impulsive, self-defeating and destructive behavior, which are unlikely to present themselves in a clinical setting, have been extensively recorded.
Alan Stone, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, wrote that, as citizens, “psychiatrists enjoy freedom of speech — just not in their professional capacity.” Individual psychiatrists have agency and can speak if they want to. But to have a substantive and effective conversation about Donald’s fitness for office, a foundation must be laid by a governing body that can more effectively communicate the overarching concerns.
Adopting a notionally neutral stance in this case doesn’t just create a void where professional expertise should be — it serves to normalize dysfunctional behavior. Paradoxically, the suggestion seems to be that speaking out about mental illness is the problem. But in truth, it is remaining silent about Donald’s obvious psychological impairment that is stigmatizing. By claiming that its silence is neutral, the APA is essentially granting Donald’s campaign an in-kind contribution while the American people remain subject to his often deranged and unpredictable behavior, without the tools necessary to evaluate it or understand how it renders him unfit for the office he holds.
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Biden Makes the Strongest Case Yet for His Presidency |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 25 October 2020 08:13 |
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Rich writes: "Almost 50 million people had voted before last night's face-off - more early voters than in the entire pre-Election Day balloting of 2016."
Joe Biden. (photo: Hilary Swift/NYT)
Biden Makes the Strongest Case Yet for His Presidency
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
25 October 20
 ast night was the final debate before Election Day. With polling continuing to indicate an advantage for Biden, did Donald Trump do anything that will boost his campaign?
As was reported ubiquitously in advance, Trump’s political allies had begged him to avoid the train wreck of the first debate by following a simple instruction for the finale: Stop interrupting so that “Sleepy Joe” will drone on and self-destruct with a disqualifying gaffe that will reveal him to be in the grip of dementia, Sanders socialism, or both. Trump, under the thumb of a mute button, did more or less as he was told, for which he was predictably rewarded with raves by the same GOP operatives whose direction he followed. Anyone not grading on a curve could see that the debate changed nothing and that arguably the tactic of letting Biden speak uninterrupted helped Biden more than Trump.
As the first debate defined Trump indelibly as a childish bully and a boor while leaving Biden on the cutting-room floor, this one gave Biden the space to actually make his case at the moment when Americans are pouring into their polling places. He hit his points crisply, and for the most part cogently, lacing his pitch for competence and national unity with just the right dose of tranquilizing retro Senate-speak that many Americans are welcoming after four years of nonstop White House rage and bombast.
Meanwhile, on the matters of substance that theoretically might allow Trump to win over that tiny contingent of wavering voters, “suburban housewives” included, Trump still had done no homework and had no answers — just the usual smokescreen of evasions and lies. No health-care plan to rescue those who stand to lose their coverage if the Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act. No explanation for his failure to negotiate a new stimulus package. No explanation for why he won’t release his tax returns. No defense of his undying love affair with Vladimir Putin. And most of all, still no plan to combat the coronavirus on a day when the number of new American cases, by some counts, hit an all-time high. He argued once again that we are “rounding the turn” and that a cure-all vaccine, like prosperity, was just around the corner.
Almost 50 million people had voted before last night’s face-off — more early voters than in the entire pre-Election Day balloting of 2016. There was nothing either candidate said that the remaining voters have not heard ad infinitum by now, with the possible exception of Trump’s defense for ripping away 545 children from parents who cannot be found: These orphans “are so well taken care of,” he explained with pride. There are still ways Trump can somehow cobble together an Electoral College victory, as FiveThirtyEight reminds us, but this debate won’t move that needle.
As my colleague Olivia Nuzzi pointed out, Trump’s one-off adherence to debate protocol prevented him from speaking in the “rambling and insane-sounding” manner of his superspreader rallies. But now those rallies are roaring back. And so will the insanity. Thanks to the White House’s self-immolating, unauthorized release of his 60 Minutes interview, we already know that on Sunday night a large viewership will see him snarl repeatedly at Lesley Stahl and whine like a crybaby when asked unsurprising questions comparable to those asked by last night’s moderator, Kristen Welker. And once again Trump will be seen in striking contrast to Biden, who presumably behaved himself in an interview conducted for the same broadcast and didn’t storm off in pique at his female questioner (Norah O’Donnell).
On the stump, it will be all Hunter Biden all the time — a conspiracy theory so impenetrable that last night Trump had to convey it in buzzwords and phrases (“the laptop,” “the horrible emails,” “10 percent to the big man,” “selling pillows and sheets”). This lingo could be decoded only by those already locked into the coverage by the acre pumped out by Murdoch outlets: Fox News, and compliant columnists like Michael Goodwin at the New York Post and Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal. The chances that any of this ostensible scandal will reach, let alone persuade, any voters not already voting for Trump are nil. What’s more, in an extraordinary development just minutes after the debate last night, the Journal’s news pages pulled the rug out from under its own editorial-page propagandists by posting an investigative report debunking the entire affair. Examining those “horrible emails” Trump had been fuming about, the paper found no evidence that Joe Biden had anything to do with an unconsummated business deal his son was trying to make in China in 2017 (when both Bidens, by the way, were private citizens).
But Trump will not let go of “Huntergate” any more than he did the equally inexplicable “Obamagate.” He will designate even Murdoch as a purveyor of Fake News rather than surrender it. And he will continue to go off on other loony and narcissistic tangents, tantrums, and personal vendettas that are irrelevant to Americans in the midst of public-health and economic crises — all the while speaking to closely packed, unmasked audiences (which he described to Stahl, hilariously, as “much bigger than we ever had”) in some of the most lethal current hot spots of the pandemic.
Many Republicans and conservatives — like Peggy Noonan, who judged Trump last night’s winner — are clinging to a single poll query as a sign of a possible upset: a Gallup finding that 56 percent of registered voters feel they are better off now than they were four years ago. Should that one data point prove to be determinative in the face of all the other polling on this race, 2020 will be the biggest debacle for American pollsters since 1936, when the Literary Digest predicted that Alf Landon would be the victor over FDR, whose landslide propelled him to victory in 46 out of 48 states.
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Sending Trump to Hell |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56768"><span class="small">Ariel Dorfman, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Sunday, 25 October 2020 08:09 |
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Dorfman writes: "For some time now, I've wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech."
Donald Trump. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)
Sending Trump to Hell
By Ariel Dorfman, TomDispatch
25 October 20
In case you hadn’t noticed, they wear masks in hell. I didn’t know that myself until this year. On the best evidence around, however, like most Americans, I’m now in a circle of hell. I feel it particularly when I’m out on streets that are starting to chill down, not heat up, as winter arrives (however slowly) and a pandemic spike in Covid-19 cases heads our way, as hospitals fill, panic grows, and the president from... well, hell... assures us that, by hook or crook (crook being perhaps the operative word here), in 2021 he plans to oversee the greatest economic comeback in history. And mind you, I’m thinking about this nightmare while out walking New York City’s streets half-blind as my glasses, just above that mask of mine, fog up with my own breath. I have no doubt that it’s the fog of hell as, at my advanced age, my friends are increasingly isolated and alone in a city, a country, a world under siege.
And bad as it might have been, it didn’t truly have to be this way, not if we had a president who cared for any of us even faintly, even microcosmically like the way he cares for himself. That’s why it gives me special pleasure today to post a piece by that wonderful Chilean writer, whose work I first began editing and publishing in book form back in the 1980s, my old friend (and TomDispatch regular) Ariel Dorfman. I read my first Dorfman piece in 1969 in another life entirely when I was still a printer at the New England Free Press. It was a critique of Walt Disney he had co-authored, years ahead of its time, called How to Read Donald Duck and I’ve never forgotten it. Today, he does what so many of us, myself included, would love to do. He ushers “our” president, Donald Trump, through the gates of Hell. Join him for a moment, even if your glasses fog over. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Sending Trump to Hell
Dante Alighieri Has Words for Donald J. Trump From the Other Side of Death
 or some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.
The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.
As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes -- Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso -- that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.
There was nothing abstract about the Hell he created. Dante pictured himself personally taking a voyage into the hereafter to meet men and women, both of his time and from the past, who were being rewarded for their virtue or eternally castigated for their offenses. Of that journey through purgatorial fires and heavenly wonders, guided by his dead childhood sweetheart Beatrice, it was the Florentine writer’s descent into the saturated circles of Hell that most fascinated and enthralled readers throughout the centuries. We listen to stories of the wicked as they express their remorse and experience the excruciatingly sophisticated torments he dreamt up as suitable reprisals for the damage they did during their earthly existence.
Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can't help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant-in-chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: the 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.
As I pondered what the Italian author would have made of Trump and his certainty that he was above the laws of society and nature, I was invaded by Dante’s divinatory and lyrical voice. It came to me as if in a hallucination. Listening carefully, I managed to record the words with which that visionary poet of yesteryear would describe a man who, until recently, believed himself invincible and invulnerable, how he would be judged and condemned once his life was over.
Here, then, is my version of Dante’s prophecy -- my way, that is, of finally consigning Donald Trump to Hell for forever and a day.
Dante Greets Trump at the Gates of Hell and Explains What His Punishment Is to Be
My name, sir, is Dante Alighieri. Among the innumerable dead that inhabit these shores, I have been chosen to speak to you because an expert on the afterlife was needed to describe what awaits your soul when it passes, as all souls must, into this land of shadows. I was chosen, whether as an honor or not, to imagine your fate once you wind your way toward us.
Having accepted this task, I was tempted, sir, as I watched your every act in that life before death, to make this easier for myself and simply conjure up the circles of Hell I had already described in my terza rima. I would then have guided you down my cascade of verses, step by step, into the depths of darkness I had designed for others.
Were you not the selfish embodiment of so many sins I dealt with in my Commedia? Lust and adultery, yes! Gluttony, yes; greed and avarice, oh yes; wrath and fury, certainly; violence, fraud, and usury, yes again! Divisiveness and treachery, even heresy -- you who did not believe in God and yet used the Bible as a prop -- yes, one more time!
Did you not practice all those iniquities, a slave to your loveless appetites? Do you not deserve to be called to account in ways I once envisioned: buffeted by vicious winds, drowning in storms of putrefaction, choking under gurgling waters of belligerence, immersed in the boiling blood that echoes rage, thirsting across a burning plain, steeped in the excrement of flattery and seduction, clawed to pieces by the night demons of corruption, or feeling that throat and tongue of yours that tore so many citizens apart mutilated and hacked to bits? Would it not be fair that, like other perjurers and impostors, you be bloated with disease? Would it not make sense that you be trapped in ice or flames, endlessly chewed by the jaws of eternity, like those who committed treason against country and friends in my time?
And yet, in the end, I rejected all of that. After all, I was selected not to repeat myself but because I was trusted to be creative and find an appropriately new reckoning for you -- something, said the authorities in charge of this place, less savage and fierce, more educational, even therapeutic. Thus have times changed since I wrote that poem of mine!
My mission, it seems, was not to insert you in rings of an already conceived Hell of terrifying revenge. So I began to seek inspiration from my fellow sufferers so many centuries later and there, indeed, they were -- your multitudes of victims, the ones who need to heal, the ones you never wanted to see or mourn, whose pain you never shared, who now want to greet you, sir, in a new way.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but I have. They’ve been lining up since the moment they arrived. Now, they’re here by my side, counting the days until your time is up and you must face them. And so I decided that they would be given a chance to do exactly that, one by one, through all eternity.
After all, each of them was devastated because of you: a father who died of the pandemic you did less than nothing to prevent; a little boy shot with a gun you did not ban; a worker overcome by toxic fumes whose release your administration ensured; the protesters killed by a white supremacist inflamed by your rhetoric; a Black man who expired thanks to police violence you refuse to condemn; a migrant who succumbed to the desert heat on the other side of the wall that you stole taxpayer money to (only partially) build. And let us not forget that female Kurdish fighter slaughtered because you betrayed her people.
On and on I could go, naming the wrongfully dead, the untimely dead, the avoidable dead, now all huddled around me, otherwise unrepresented and forgotten but awaiting your arrival for their moment of truth. Each of them will have to be patient, since according to my plan, every single casualty of yours will be afforded whatever time he or she desires to relive a life and recount its last moments. You will be forced, sir, to listen to their stories again and again until you finally learn how to make their sorrow your own, until their tragedies truly lodge in the entrails of your mind, as long as it takes you to truly ask for forgiveness.
Trump Tries to Find a Way Out of Hell
Your first reaction will undoubtedly be to indulge in the fantasy that, just as you swore the pandemic would be magically dispatched, so this new predicament will miraculously melt into nothingness. When you open your eyes, however, and still find yourself here, your urge will be to call on all your old tricks, those of the ultimate con man, to avoid sinking deeper into the moral abyss I’ve prepared for you.
Just as you’ve bribed, bought, and inveigled your way out of scandals and bankruptcies, so you’ll believe you can bluster and wriggle your way out of this moment, too. You’ll try to pretend you’re just hosting one more (ir)reality TV show where this Dante fellow can be turned into another of your apprentices, competing for your largesse and approval.
And when none of that works, you’ll make believe that you have indeed atoned for your terrible deeds and fall again into the lies and macho bravado that were your second skin. You’ll swear that you have repented so you can escape this confinement, these rooms where you have become the prey rather than the predator. You will present yourself as a savior, boast of having singlehandedly concocted a vaccine against accountability, discovered a manly cure for the terrors of Hell. You’ll dream -- I know you will -- of reappearing victorious and, of course, maskless on that White House balcony.
This time, though, it just won’t work, not here in this transparent abode of death. And yet you will certainly try to hurry the process up because you’ll know -- I’ve already decided that much -- that those you ruined while you were still alive are only the start of your journey, not the end. You will become all too aware, while you spend hours, days, years, decades with the men, women, and children you consigned to an early mortality and permanent grief, that a multitude of others will be arriving, all those who will perish in the future due to your neglect and malevolence.
They will, I assure you, snake endlessly into your mind, accumulating through many tomorrows, all those who are yet to die but will do so prematurely as the brutality you worshipped and fueled takes its toll, as the earth, heavens, and waters you ravaged exact heat waves of revenge -- hurricanes and droughts and famines and floods, ever more victims with each minute that slithers by, including the women who will die in botched back-alley abortions because of your judicial nominations. The decades to come are already preparing to welcome the legions of your dead.
That is the despair I imagine for you now that I am no longer the man bitterly exiled from his beloved Florence. The centuries spent in the afterlife have evidently softened me into compassion for those who have sinned. Beatrice, the love of my life, would have admired my transformation, the one that, as you are ground down and down, will also allow you to be lifted up and up until you really do repent, until you beg for an absolution, which (if you are truly sincere) will be granted.
Even so, even as I speak and divine, I find myself eaten by a worm of doubt. This, I am being told, has been tried before. The mists of time are filled with men who, like you, thought they were gods and who, upon their demise, were led howling into rooms overflowing with the lives they broke, with the irreparable damage they wrought. And these criminals -- Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Napoleon Bonaparte, Andrew Jackson, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin (oh, the list is endless!) -- never left the twisted mirror of their own penitential rooms.
They are still stagnating in them. That’s what’s being whispered in my ear, that the redemptive prophecy of Dante Alighieri will never come true for you, Donald Trump. Perhaps like those other accursed malefactors, you will refuse responsibility. Perhaps you will continue to claim that you are the real victim. Perhaps you will prove as incorrigible and defective and stubbornly blind as they continue to be. Perhaps there is an evil in you and the universe that will never completely abate, a cruelty that has no end. Perhaps when pain is infinite, it is impossible to erase.
I fear, then, that it may be unkind to promise any kind of justice when there will be none for those who stand in line hoping to meet their tormentor on the other side of death. Why, I ask myself, resurrect the dead if it be only to dash their hopes again and again?
What Forever Means
And yet, what else can I do but complete the task given to me? Of all poets, I was chosen because of the Divina Commedia that I wrote when I was alive and banished from Florence, because I descended into the Inferno and climbed the mount of Purgatory and caught a glimpse of what the sun and stars of Paradise looked like. I was chosen from the fields of the dead to prepare these words for you as a warning or a plea or a searing indictment, an assignment I accepted and cannot now renounce.
What’s left to me, then, but to conclude these words by responding to the one objection you might legitimately raise to my picture of your fate in the afterlife? I imagine you crying out -- "But Dante Alighieri," you will say, "the future you’ve painted will take forever."
And I will answer: yes, Donald J. Trump, it will indeed take forever, but forever is all you have, all any of us have, after all.
Ariel Dorfman, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Death and the Maiden. His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes in jail, and The Rabbits Rebellion, a story for adults and children. He lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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The Militia That Fox News Built |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56760"><span class="small">Alex Wagner, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Saturday, 24 October 2020 12:55 |
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Wagner writes: "As early voting began in Atlanta, Georgia, last week, members of the local Security Force Three Percent, a self-styled military group composed of roughly 400 members, were smoking Marlboro 100s and waxing apocalyptic about the state of America."
'From a television screen tuned to Fox News, it's not all that hard to see the brownshirts on the horizon.' (photo: Seth Herald/Getty Images)
The Militia That Fox News Built
By Alex Wagner, The Atlantic
24 October 20
If America descends into civil war, at least we’ll know what channel was on when it began.
 s early voting began in Atlanta, Georgia, last week, members of the local Security Force Three Percent, a self-styled military group composed of roughly 400 members, were smoking Marlboro 100s and waxing apocalyptic about the state of America.
“Well, I think the coronavirus is a scam, first and foremost,” declared Chris Hill, the commanding officer of the militia, who goes by the nom de guerre General BloodAgent. “Two, I think that watching all of the videos of people’s civil liberties being infringed upon—being arrested for sitting in your empty business, being arrested for sitting in your car looking at the ocean, having cops or security guards tasing women that are watching their kid play football—these are things that I would not suffer.”
The pandemic, Hill suggested, was nothing more than a government conspiracy to steal the rights of everyday Americans. Hill’s deputy, a man named Corey Wells, who goes by the title Sergeant Treeman, likened the situation in the United States to the rise of Nazism. “When Hitler took over Germany, he didn’t do it in one day. He did it over the course of time. He started taking one little right away, the next little right away, the next thing you know, you’ve got millions of Jews loaded on box cars headed to concentration camps. We’re watching that pretty much here in the United States now.”
Hill and Wells were prepared to take up arms, come what may. “Our wealth, our liberties, have been stolen from us, and it’s time that people wake up to that, smell the coffee, before it hits you across the face like an iron fist and you wake up a stranger in the land that you were born in,” Hill said. “I’m not going down like that. Not on my watch. Not on our watch.”
“This country right now is a tinder box,” Wells said. “This whole country is like California—just waiting on a spark to land in it. And when it does, it’s gonna be bad. The original Civil War has nothing on what’s coming.”
It was a sunny autumn day in Atlanta, but the sense of darkness was acute—as if Hill and Wells were living in an alternate reality, a dystopian nightmare in which the brownshirts were not just coming; they were here. I wondered aloud how such an inverted view of the world was possible, and the men explained.
“I used to get information off of Facebook,” said Hill. “We would trade information, but Facebook signed an … internal order. They got rid of militiamen on Facebook, so I got booted off. Twitter used to be a source for information; I got booted off of Twitter. Instagram, PayPal, GoFundMe, you name it. I’m probably gonna get booted off of YouTube as well. But I don’t go to CNN. If I go to media it would be to—I like Tucker Carlson.”
Carlson, the Fox News prime-time host, was the only mainstream media figure cited by both Hill and Wells as reliable. Most other outlets, Hill believed, were “propaganda and horseshit.” To circumvent this duplicity, Wells explained, he took, “the Fox News reports, the One America News [Network]—that’s the one news source I trust—Tucker Carlson, [Sean] Hannity. You have to listen to everybody, take everything, put it in a big blender, use your common sense that the good Lord gave you, and kinda pull out the information that you feel is true.”
As I examined the litany of stories that Hill had cited as the basis for his belief that American civil liberties were being attacked—the woman being tased at the football game, the arrest of Trump supporters near the ocean, the business owners running afoul of law enforcement—I found that they were all stories that appeared on Fox News. The items may not have originated at the Fox news desk, but Fox was nonetheless playing a crucial role in mainstreaming a decidedly paranoid worldview and giving it the widest audience possible.
In September of this year, the prime-time weekday lineup of Carlson, Hannity, and Laura Ingraham surpassed all the broadcast networks—traditionally dominant in terms of sheer audience numbers—in total weekday viewership. Within the field of cable competitors (MSNBC and CNN) Hannity remains the undisputed king, and Carlson his prince; last month, they commanded the first and second largest audiences in all of cable news, averaging 4.5 million and 4.4 million viewers, respectively.
Fox News’s unique blend of xenophobia and division has always been popular and highly lucrative. But now, with the advent of COVID-19, the channel has become a marketplace for something considerably more poisonous: increasingly dystopian coverage of the country that provides fodder for radicals such as Hill and Wells to justify their apocalyptic visions. Wells was preoccupied with Hitler’s incremental infringements on liberty (“He didn’t do it in one day. He did it over the course of time. He started taking one little right away, the next little right away …”), and here, on Fox, was all the evidence he needed that Americans were witnessing the very same thing—business owners arrested, mothers tased, the list of discreet but meaningful attacks broadcast every night, across the country, a warning sign. In previous years, Fox could claim credit for Republican intransigence on immigration reform and the party’s willful denial of climate change. Today, Fox plays a significant role in stoking fear that it may be time for a second American civil war.
Precisely because Fox is considered mainstream news, it has, no less importantly, provided a link between marginalized audiences—like the Security Force Three Percenters—and the highest echelons of American power, including the president of the United States. At an NBC town hall earlier this month, Trump declined to disavow a fringe conspiracy theory that Democrats are secretly running a Satanic pedophile ring. I was reminded of this when I spoke, days later, with Hill and Wells, who at one point referred to Biden as “Pedo Joe.” The concentric circles of paranoia that once separated the most radical theorists from the most mainstream conservatives have, with the assistance of Fox, grown dramatically smaller—indeed, under President Trump they might even overlap.
While Hannity and Carlson are not directly peddling this shameful slander, Fox has undeniably poisoned a broad section of the American public through its constant drumbeat of stories promoting fear and mistrust, eroding confidence in institutions and our democracy. From a television screen tuned to Fox News, it’s not all that hard to see the brownshirts on the horizon or the pedophiles in the pizza parlor, whether you’re a self-styled militiaman—or the commander in chief.
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here are several ways to describe the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge 
