The demons are loose.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have cut their final ties to the Constitution and have mounted up to spread destruction. These demons gallop through the country on horseback, eagerly waging war with sanity, facts and anyone who scares them — which is pretty much the whole world.
Vice President JD Vance is pulling up the rear on Air Force II, flying into venues across the country yelling “Da Plane. Da Plane,” in his best Tattoo voice.
Each of President Donald Trump’s apocalyptic demons have their own expertise. Miller, astride his white-nationalist steed, spreads fear and hatred. He is conquest. Kennedy rides bareback and shirtless aboard a black death horse. He is the master of pestilence and disease; famine. Bondi, riding on top of the red steed of blood, is lawlessness and anger; she is war. Behold the pale horse leading them: Trump. He is death, and hell follows with him.
Our world is haunted by such demons, as Bondi proved on Monday when she moved to squelch those who would criticize recently slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk. “For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,” she said. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Then on Wednesday, ABC indefinitely suspended late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel after he made a joke about Trump and Kirk.
So much for free speech.
We made these demons. We have encouraged them and we have fed them.
Each side in this demon-haunted world blames the other for the very conditions they decry.
They both are right.
We clutch the pearls of pseudo-science and wisdom we glean from our favorite poisoned well of journalism while our critical faculties erode. We cannot tell what feels right from what’s factual. We are overwhelmed by suspicion and superstition alike — and I’m not just talking about RFK Jr.
Some are convinced that the internet and social media are our biggest problems. Many politicians, entertainers, scholars and journalists say as much. Trump certainly exploits social, and all other, media. He practically governs by fiat on Truth Social as if he were a medieval lord, while his minions relentlessly disperse their anger and vitriol across cyberspace. His opponents do the same.
Some of his opponents are smart enough to troll him on social media — but then again, being smarter than Donald Trump isn’t unusual or difficult.
“Smart people don’t like me,” he publicly declared on Sept. 14. “Yes. This is true,” his niece Mary Trump said in response. “He told the truth this week.”
But it isn’t just people who can outsmart him. There’s a reason the president doesn’t like dogs.
Anonymity provides the ability to troll endlessly; the lack of identification combined with the lack of experiences gives anyone credibility, even if they don’t deserve it. Those with great experience on a subject have little to no ability to do battle with the smug, the young and the inexperienced. That is why many people, including Kirk, were able to gather a following.
So, the problem isn’t social media. That’s a tool. The problem is those using the tool and how it is managed by our government. Anonymity provides the ability to troll endlessly; the lack of identification combined with the lack of experiences gives anyone credibility, even if they don’t deserve it. Those with great experience on a subject have little to no ability to do battle with the smug, the young and the inexperienced. That is why many people, including Kirk, were able to gather a following. The government has failed us on social media as badly as it failed us in traditional media, and in so doing, the government helped fan the flames of extremism. The media owners make the profit and the government exerts control. Trump is the end game of 40 years of this collusion between government and oligarchs. The billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate the media, and Trump uses it as leverage to silence his critics.
Walter Cronkite once said to me privately something that he often said publicly: “We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.” The digital age has only exacerbated a problem that already existed.
It is increasingly difficult to look at either political party in this country without coming to the conclusion that we desperately need to raise our investment in mental health services.
The president leads a party whose principle slogan seems to be “My way or the highway.” Democrats appear leaderless and listless. They have no principle slogan. The best they can do right now is argue over pronouns while one of them trolls Trump on social media. Meh. It’s a start, I guess.
Trump is part of a political party that “preaches Christianity without ever knowing one thing Jesus said,” Sirius/XM host John Fugelsang said on the “Just Ask the Question” podcast. In his new book, “The Separation of Church and Hate,” he refers to Trump Christians as ignorant opportunists. “I’ve come to view Jesus the way I’ve come to view Elvis. I love the guy, but some of the fan clubs terrify me.”
The president has cornered the market on Christians, the rural poor, the working class and the undereducated. A small but growing percentage of Trump’s voters would support someone else if they saw something in it for them. It says a lot about these people that they would favor a morally bankrupt criminal, who is intent on destroying the Constitution, rather than a Democrat. It says a lot about the general composition of the Republican Party, but it says even more about Democrats.
Twice the party could not come up with a candidate to defeat a man as loathsome as Trump, who is now allegedly making billions off his presidency while exploding the debt, abandoning our allies and increasing the likelihood of another world war.
This week he used the military to blow up another boat off the coast of Venezuela, claiming those on the boat were narco-terrorists. He offered no proof. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said the country would defend itself against U.S. “aggression” and called Secretary of State Marco Rubio the “lord of death and war.” The action followed a previous strike on Sept. 1 that killed 11 people, after which legal experts told the BBC that the U.S. may have violated international human rights and maritime law. Less than three weeks later, Trump apparently put in a phone call to some Mickey Mouse organization and got Kimmel fired.
While Trump is dragging us to hell, the Democrats are trying to decide how much to blame former President Joe Biden for everything. In an excerpt from her memoir “107 Days,” which will be released on Tuesday, former Vice President Kamala Harris attacked Biden for his “recklessness” in deciding to seek another term. Her comments set off another wave of criticism and second-guessing among Democrats that was directed toward the former president — when they could have been marshaling forces to oppose the policies of the current one.
They might as well join Trump.
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That aside, strife between the parties is rising, even as we continue to ignore or contribute to increased international tensions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has his country’s military exterminating Palestinians in Gaza. Genocide wasn’t acceptable during the Holocaust, and it isn’t acceptable now. Farther north, Russian President Vladimir “The Impaler” Putin is still killing Ukrainians while attempting to test the waters elsewhere in Europe. Trump tap dances for peace, but Putin doesn’t want peace. Their Alaskan summit can now be seen for what it was — Trump bending the knee to the Russian dictator. “It’s Biden and Zelenskyy’s war not mine,” Trump has repeatedly said, echoing Putin. Meanwhile, as recently as Sept. 14, Putin was flying drones over Romania and Poland. Trump said it may have been a mistake. The Polish Prime Minister said the drone incursion was a test of NATO, and that we haven’t been this close to conflict since the end of World War II.
While our entire political system sounds like it was assembled by the Marx Brothers, we’re busy deciding whether it’s okay to criticize, or merely quote, Charlie Kirk.
The right-wing influencer is not above criticism. None of us are. But no one should die because of an expressed opinion. You can hate me, but you can’t act on that hate. “Death penalties should be public, should be quick. It should be televised,” Kirk once said on his podcast. I disagree wholeheartedly, and his death is the clearest reason why.
Kirk also called Biden a “corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” He was wrong then too.
But however much I disagreed with him politically, what happened to him should never be tolerated. He was denied due process, denied a life to grow and change his mind and denied a life raising his children and loving his family.
That said, he acted like a child with little experience, and he appealed to younger children who have none. He was addicted to his cause, which was himself. Kirk’s opinions were spoken to anger and appeal to disaffected young voters who have had nothing but disinformation fed to them their entire lives.
We’ve lost the ability to face these uncomfortable, complicated realities. Kirk was neither a demon nor a saint, and looking for the cause of his death in slogans and political statements is pointless — if you want to solve the problem. The person who pulled the trigger is responsible. That person alone made the decision to end a man’s life. Every one of us should condemn the action and make sure it is never repeated. Our children and our grandchildren deserve better.
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Abraham Lincoln, in a reply to Sen. Stephen Douglas dated October 16, 1854, said that slavery was founded in the selfishness of man’s nature and opposition to it was founded in his love of justice.
Many today believe we are living in parallel times just prior to the Civil War. I disagree.
Today, our country is short on love and filled with selfishness brought about by the hegemony of the very rich. That’s modern slavery. It is to the advantage of the rich to keep us arguing and angry with one another while they continue to rob us blind. Oligarchs run our country. Freedom of choice and free speech are illusions. We have no choice. Health care, education, justice and liberty are bought and paid for, and most people can’t afford them.
Kimmel’s firing shows us that Trump has now coalesced his power sufficiently to force any corporate critic to bend the knee. Independent voices may remain, but Trump and the GOP have successfully created a martyr in Charlie Kirk to destroy critical thinking, sideline humor and silence the press — and anyone who says something Trump cannot handle.
We are indeed haunted by demons sent to divide us, while the man sitting on top of the pale horse is driving us to hell.
And he still won’t talk about Jeff Epstein.
