Suddenly, he’s feisty:
Todd didn’t mention Jordans sensitive tweet on Holocaust Remembrance Day lamenting the demise of gas ovens:
He hasn’t removed it. But then he’s the same guy who, as Chairman of the House GOP Judiciary Committee, left this up for months so …
This chart is old, but it’s still good.
Narcissists gonna narcissist.
On that note, Kirschner told The Legal Breakdown (via Newsweek):
“I think prosecutors who are investigating Donald Trump are going to need all the support they can find both legally and atmospherically, and that’s why I think once one indictment drops, and the others begin to drop, that’s when you’re going to see Donald Trump fold like a house of cards. And I think he’s going to be desperate to strike whatever kind of deals he can strike to minimize his exposure, ultimately, to prison,” the former federal prosecutor added.
When do tickets go on sale?
NATO reached a turning point last week both in its relationship with Ukraine and in its posture toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Tanks are on the way to Ukraine (Der Spiegel):
In just a few months, 14 Leopard 2A6 tanks from Germany are to be at the front in the war against Russia. Berlin has also granted Poland permission to send its own Leopards. The United States is sending battle tanks, as is Britain. Western support for Ukraine has thus reached yet another new level, both militarily and politically. Pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin will rise, but so too, perhaps, will the chance of pushing Russia completely out of Ukraine. The move, though, also comes with a higher level of risk – that the West will become even more deeply involved in this war. That the situation could spin out of control.
For Ukraine, such risks are secondary to its ongoing existential struggle. From Kyiv’s perspective, the decision to send Leopard battle tanks was long overdue, particularly given Russia’s apparent preparations for a spring offensive. Ukraine has been demanding the tanks for months, and now, the first of them will soon arrive. “Cheers my dear friends in Germany,” tweeted Andriy Melnyk, the former Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, after DER SPIEGEL announced Scholz’s decision on Tuesday evening. “Today I will get drunk.”
NATO does not exist just so the major powers can reinforce their influence with forces from less well-endowed allies, writes Phillips Payson O’Brien in The Atlantic. Smaller members and partners closer to the Russian border cannot afford their big brothers’ complacency. Their concerns can have leverage with larger allies. And they have.
Basically, Ukraine insisted NATO put up or shut up. Give us the tanks:
Since the start of the war, Germany and the U.S. have tried to give Ukraine enough military aid to perform well on the battlefield, but not so much that the Ukrainians can drive Russian forces out of all of occupied Ukraine—including areas that Russia occupied in 2014. Washington and Berlin have kept sending the same mixed signals: Russia cannot win the war, and Ukraine cannot be allowed to lose, but in the end, the defenders might have to make some significant concessions to the invaders to secure a peace deal.
That message has sounded more and more discordant to states to Germany’s north and east. The longer the war has gone on, and the more grotesque the crimes and destruction that the Russian government has been willing to commit against its neighbor and ostensible “little brother,” Ukraine, the more these states have become convinced that Russia must not only be denied a victory but be defeated outright. During the 20th century, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were incorporated into the Soviet Union against their will. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia were ruled as Soviet vassals during the Cold War. These countries’ leaders instinctively understand the threat of Russian imperialism, and take Moscow’s rhetoric about national expansion and greatness as the menace that it is. They want to see Russian power broken.
Putin’s hunger for a new Russian empire has driven reluctant European nations into the NATO alliance. His invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine demonstrated that counting on Moscow to stay out of neighbors’ affairs (and borders) was no longer an operative strategy, especially for Finland which shares a long border with Putin’s would-be empire:
It quickly applied for NATO membership—which is almost sure to be granted, regardless of the recent stance of the Turkish and Hungarian governments. Of all world leaders, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has expressed the need to counter the Russian threat most bluntly. She has regretted European Union weakness in opposing Russian actions in Ukraine since 2014 and said that Ukrainian membership in NATO would have prevented the present crisis. She has openly called for Russia’s defeat, saying that its withdrawal from Ukrainian territory is “the way out of the conflict.” Without hesitation, she recently tied her own country’s security to Ukraine’s. “We don’t know when the war will end, but we have to make sure that the Ukrainians will win,” Marin said. “I don’t think there’s any other choice. If Russia would win the war, then we would only see decades of this kind of behavior ahead of us.”
The decisions to send in tanks is a fraught one. But Poland, Sweden, Estonia and other allies have hardened their resolve to see Russia not just contained but defeated. “In what became known as the Tallinn Pledge, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands joined NATO states in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia in calling for Russia to be pushed out of all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and other areas occupied before last February 24.”
England has the Channel. The U.S. has the Atlantic. But if NATO is a true partnership, the junior partners want their say. Their butts are not just on the line. In some cases, they are on the front line.
The world is becoming a more dangerous place than it has been for the U.S. in years. It’s easy to tell others to play the hands they are dealt. It’s more unsettling when the cards are yours. For Ukraine, the war is life or death. Putin is not bluffing. NATO may not be all in, but its most vulnerable members are not calling. They insist that NATO raise. And it has.
Trump has gotten away with criminal and corrupt behavior his whole life, largely because the authorities just couldn’t ever be bothered with taking the risk of doing anything about it. That remains true today:
Days before then-President Donald Trump left the White House, federal prosecutors in New York discussed whether to potentially charge Trump with campaign finance crimes once he was out of office, according to a new book from CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig.
Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York developed significant evidence against Trump when they charged his former attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 over a hush money scheme paying two women claiming affairs with Trump, including adult film star Stormy Daniels, Honig writes. But prosecutors did not consider charging Trump at the time because of longstanding Justice Department guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
With Trump about to leave office in January 2021, however, Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney, held multiple discussions with a small group of prosecutors to discuss its evidence against Trump. They decided to not seek an indictment of Trump for several reasons, Honig writes, including the political ramifications and the fact that Trump’s other scandals, such as efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection, “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.”
“We were well aware of the prudential reasons why you wouldn’t charge a president, even after he was out of office,” one person with knowledge of the investigation told Honig.
Honig’s book, “Untouchable,” explores how Trump and other powerful people “get away with it,” focusing both on the former president as well as some of the mob bosses Honig took on when he was an assistant US attorney in New York from 2004-2012 and a state prosecutor in New Jersey.
They jailed Michael Cohen instead after he cooperated, pled guilty and testified before congress.
Jonathan Chait’s observation here is right on:
There is an enduring pattern in American conservatism in which the right first develops a paranoid interpretation of the liberal Establishment, and then reverse engineers its own version of the monster it has imagined. Conservatives convinced themselves that the mainstream media and universities were mere propaganda organs, then created institutions like the Heritage Foundation and Fox News, warped reflections of their own overheated critique. The January 6 insurrection was, of course, in the mind of its participants, a “response” to the imagined vote-fraud conspiracy and its antifa/BLM shock troops.
John Durham’s investigation is a classic episode in this tradition. The American right first convinced itself that Robert Mueller and the deep state, using the cover of dispassionate professionalism, had launched a partisan witch hunt to smear Donald Trump. In response, it created a right-wing mirror image, as fervently partisan and unhinged as they believed their enemies to be.
I would say the “weaponization committee” is the Bizarro Worldversion of the January 6th Committee too. This is how they roll.
His recap of the big NY Times story on the Durham probe is worth reading too:
The purpose of special counsel is to wall off a politically sensitive investigation from the attorney general. But Durham, reports the Times, was working closely with Barr behind closed doors all along. The two Republicans dined and drank together, and came to share Barr’s Fox News–brained beliefs that Trump had been the victim of a conspiracy.
Rather than preventing Barr from meddling in a politicized investigation, this arrangement inverted that purpose and laundered Barr’s involvement through Durham’s putative independence. “At some point, some particularly ill-informed critic of the administration may try to paint Durham as a right-wing hack or Republican loyalist,” wrote National Review’s Jim Geraghty in a fawning profile, singling out the NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill for having the temerity to suggest Durham might have been compromised by serving Trump’s ends.
Durham and Barr kept failing to prove the deep-state conspiracy they imagined, but continued to press forward anyway. At one point they seized upon hacked Russian memos that intelligence analysts deemed obviously fake, instead treating them as a valuable intelligence trove, and tried to prove it out, even harassing one of the targets to obtain his emails (which contained nothing incriminating). It weirdly reflected the Trumpist accusation that Robert Mueller had been tricked into pursuing Russian disinformation.
As Durham kept failing to find support for the conspiracy he was pursuing, and which Barr kept floating in public, his deputies chafed at his obsession. Eventually, one of them resigned in protest when he brought charges against Michael Sussmann, a target of the right. As his former lieutenants expected, Durham’s case was defeated in court.
The weirdest episode of all uncovered by the Times centers around a tip Durham received during a trip he took with Barr — again, colluding with the figure he was supposed to be independent from — to Italy, in pursuit of one of Barr’s conspiracy theories. On the visit, Italian officials supplied credible evidence of a financial crime by Donald Trump. This, of course, was not only outside Durham’s remit, but directly undermined it. He was trying to lock up Mr. Trump’s enemies, not Mr. Trump himself.
Barr responded by handing the lead over to Durham. (What happened to the lead remains a fascinating dangling thread.) But the fact that there was now real evidence of an actual crime made its way into the media. And the media assumed the crime must have been committed by the people Durham was appointed to investigate. And so the media reported this fact as an indication Durham was going to bring criminal charges against the deep state.
The conservative media breathlessly hyped up Durham’s probe, treating every claim by Barr and every accusation by Durham as though it were proof. “These last two DOJ indictments — first of Hillary’s lawyer, then of Christopher Steele’s main source — show that the Clinton campaign funded and fed to the FBI a gigantic batch of lies in the 2016 election, which the vast bulk of the media spent 3 years ratifying and spreading,” insisted a breathless Glenn Greenwald.
Of course, the indictments merely alleged this, and conspicuously failed to prove it. His indictments followed a pattern of making sweeping claims, but only trying to prove very narrow crimes, and then failing to do so. But the conservative-messaging apparatus, which was otherwise engaged in relentless cynicism of the FBI, treated Durham as beyond reproach, even invincible.
He became the right-wing version of the superhero figure Mueller had become in the mind of the most optimistic resistance liberals. “If Durham chooses to bring charges against any official who launched the Trump probe, history suggests he is extremely likely to persuade a jury to convict the accused and sustain those convictions upon appeal,” wrote Geraghty, a prediction that proved extremely false.
It was, of course, perfectly appropriate for the Justice Department to oversee the FBI investigation of Trump. The problem is that the investigation happened without Durham. Michael Horowitz, the Department’s inspector general, conducted a thorough investigation of the FBI probe into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 campaign. He found, aside from one low-level FBI staffer, that the FBI acted properly and the investigation of Trump was predicated on a tip the bureau received from a foreign diplomat. It was not cooked up by Hillary, Obama, or any other Fox News hate figure.
Barr appointed Durham to contravene that finding. It was the conservative counter-Establishment operating in its familiar way. They looked at the work of staid nonpartisan bureaucrats — in this case, Michael Horowitz — and rejecting their conclusions as liberal bias. In response, they constructed a wildly partisan and frequently unethical operation to lend credence to their fantasies.
This failure will not dim their luster in the eyes of the right. It will consecrate their martyrdom.
“The biggest scandal of Russiagate was that the U.S. security state fabricated false stories and false evidence, and then laundered them to the nation’s largest media outlets, which mindlessly published them,” wrote Greenwald. This is a wildly distorted description of how the Russia scandal unfolded, but a perfect account of the behavior by Trump and his conservative-media allies.
The paranoid style of American conservatism is imprinted upon the institutions it creates. The Durham probe will go down in history as a monument to the right’s fever-dream defenses of Trump’s corruption.
I’m fairly sure most of you don’t watch Fox News or other right wing media. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to . But I think it’s important to pass on at least some of what they’re doing so we know where Republican voters are getting some of this stuff. Here’s Tucker Carlson this week proposing that the US invade Canada:
Tucker Carlson on Thursday called for the U.S. to invade Canada and remove Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Fox News host claimed he meant it before saying he was talking himself “into a frenzy.”Â
During Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today,” Carlson referenced the arrests last year of anti-vax truckers in Canada. The demonstrators paralyzed commerce and won over extremists with their traffic-tying protests of COVID-19 safety measures. At the time, Carlson said the country had become a dictatorship because the government took action.
And now he suggested he’d like to do something about it.
“I’m completely in favor of a Bay of Pigs operation to liberate that country,” Carlson said. “Why should we stand back and let our biggest trading partner … why should we let it become Cuba? Like, why don’t we liberate it? We’re spending all this money to liberate Ukraine from the Russians. Why are we not sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau? And I mean it.”
The right-wing personality then laughed and said, “I’m just talking myself into a frenzy here.”
A Bay of Pigs operation? Sounds great. What could go wrong?
It’s tempting to think that Carlson is just joking or trolling at worst. But he’s really off the deep end in a dozen different ways and I don’t think people who watch him see him as a comedian. Here are just a few other example from the last week:
Those are just two. Here are a few more from Tuck and other Fox News hosts from this week.
I had always assumed that Carlson was joking most of the time, sticking it to the libs and tongue in cheek. But I don’t think that anymore. I think he’s truly drawn to the Viktor Orban ideology and is quite serious about pushing that agenda. I also think he’s hungry for big money, (That New York Times profile from a few months ago makes that clear.) But I’m increasingly convinced that he’s going nuts. I mean that in a purely clinical sense of the word. He’s unstable. Watch that video and hear his looney laughter. He does that all the time and it’s extremely creepy. I don’t think he can help it.
I guess the big question is what so many people see in this guy. They love to watch him and I don’t think it’s in a train wreck sort of way. They truly think he’s telling them something important. They believe him.
Here’s what’s happening and it isn’t just in Florida. Other red states are following DeSantis’s lead. Judd Legum’s Popular Information newsletter had the story:
Teachers in Manatee County, Florida, are being told to make their classroom libraries — and any other “unvetted” book — inaccessible to students, or risk felony prosecution. The new policy is part of an effort to comply with new laws and regulations championed by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). It is based on the premise, promoted by right-wing advocacy groups, that teachers and librarians are using books to “groom” students or indoctrinate them with leftist ideologies.
Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, told Popular Information that the policy was communicated to principals in a meeting last Wednesday. Individual schools are now in the process of informing teachers and other staff.
Teachers in Manatee County lamented the news on social media. “My heart is broken for Florida students today as I am forced to pack up my classroom library,” one Manatee teacher wrote on Facebook.
Another Manatee teacher called the directive “a travesty to education” that interfered with efforts to “connect with books and develop [a] love of lifelong learning.”
In an interview with Popular Information, Chapman said that the policy was put into place last week in response to HB 1467, which was signed into law by DeSantis last March. That law established that teachers could not be trusted to select books appropriate for their students. Instead, the law requires:
Each book made available to students through a school district library media center or included in a recommended or assigned school or grade-level reading list must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate, regardless of whether the book is purchased, donated, or otherwise made available to students.
In Florida, school librarians are called “media specialists” and hold media specialist certificates. A rule passed by the Florida Department of Education last week states that a “library media center” includes any books made available to students, including in classrooms. This means that classroom libraries that are curated by teachers, not librarians, are now illegal.
The law requires that all library books selected be:
1. Free of pornography and material prohibited under s. 847.012.
2. Suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material presented.
3. Appropriate for the grade level and age group for which the materials are used or made available
That’s pretty broad, subjective, criteria, no? I can imagine “Romeo and Juliet” being deemed inappropriate for high schoolers by some wingnut parents. And, of course, this is all a joke. Kids have access to things on the internet that would make the hair on the backs of these throwbacks’ necks stand up on end — if they knew. But they don’t. They are living in a moronic world in which reading literature is dangerous while their kids are on their phones all day in an alternate universe. They are completely out of touch.
But this is all performative anyway, right. They’re just doing this to flex their muscles and show the world who’s in charge. Most of them are ignorant twits being led around by cynical political opportunists. It would be sad if it weren’t so frightening:
Chapman says that school principals in Manatee County were told Wednesday that any staff member violating these rules by providing materials “harmful to minors” could be prosecuted for “a felony of the third degree.” Therefore, teachers must make their classroom libraries inaccessible to students until they can establish that each book has been approved by a librarian.Â
They are threatening these overworked, underpaid teachers with felonies.
In response to the policy, some teachers packed up their classroom libraries. Others covered up the books students are no longer allowed to read with construction paper.
Restoring student access to classroom libraries is a complex process. First, someone must cross-check each book in their classroom library with the district library catalog. If the book is available in the district libraries, that means it was approved by a media specialist and can be made available to students again. But any book not currently held in the district libraries must be individually evaluated and approved by a librarian.
And that’s just the beginning. Materials prepared for an upcoming Manatee County School Board meeting include a 21-point list of procedures to ensure that classroom libraries comply with the new rules.
As a result, one Manatee teacher reported being forced to take Sneezy the Snowman and Dragons Love Tacos off the shelves pending review. Other teachers, fearing criminal liability, are telling students not to bring in “unvetted” books from home:
I’m sure you won’t be surprised at the guidelines. Here’s just one part:
Education about subjects that rightwingers don’t like is now called “indoctrination.”
A subsequent slide provides a list of “unsolicited theories that may lead to student indoctrination,” which includes information about “sexual orientation or gender identity.” It also includes a variety of topics related to race, including “Critical Race Theory” and material that might make someone feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” as a result of their race. The training instructs librarians to “err on the side of caution.”Â
The right has been pounding the table about public education for many, many decades and their fervor waxes and wanes over time. This isn’t new. They hate public schools because they are public, which means taxes pay to educate children they don’t like. And they also hate public schools because they are secular because they believe that while children should not be “indoctrinated” by learning about things their parents don’t believe or understand, they do believe that children should have Christianity shoved down their throats. This has been a battle going all the way back to the Scopes trial.
That’s not to say this isn’t dangerous. DeSantis is emerging as the premier culture war General of our time and he’s seeking power and his movement is a major force in American politics. They have a propaganda apparatus unparalleled in our history. But I’m a little bit skeptical that they will be able to keep kids from being “indoctrinated” even if they manage to get their phones out of their hands during the school day as DeSantis is trying to do (and which the socialist, groomer teachers would heartily applaud.) They can’t control the flow of information and kids know it. They are creating a generation of rebels — against them.
Can the Trump Organization recover from the loss of one of their top executives?Actually, does the Trump Organization still exist?
He is one of the “stars” of Trump affiliated Rumble, the right wing YouTube alternative. I ask once again. How many right wing media entities are there anyway? How many do they need?
Noah Lanard and David Corn find that fact-chaecking the freshman congressman from New York is more like editing a work of fiction:
In September 2020, George Santos’ congressional campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800—the maximum amount—to his first bid for a House seat. Their listed address was 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey.
A search of various databases reveals no one in the United States named Victoria or Jonathan Regor. Moreover, there is nobody by any name living at 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson. That address doesn’t exist. There is a New Mexico Street in Jackson, but the numbers end in the 20s, according to Google Maps and a resident of the street.
Santos’ 2020 campaign finance reports also list a donor named Stephen Berger as a $2,500 donor and said he was a retiree who lived on Brandt Road in Brawley, California. But a spokesperson for William Brandt, a prominent rancher and Republican donor, tells Mother Jones that Brandt has lived at that address for at least 20 years and “neither he or his wife (the only other occupant [at the Brandt Road home]) have made any donations to George Santos. He does not know Stephen Berger nor has Stephen Berger ever lived at…Brandt Road.”
Federal law makes it illegal to donate to a federal political campaign under a false name. But then, we don’t even know what the congressman’s real name is.
Lawrence O’Donnell the other night noted that Santos (if that is his name) did not show up at a White House event for new members of Congress to which he was invited. Perhaps, O’Donnell speculated, because one must furnish the Secret Service with a birthdate and Social Security number so they can run a background check before letting you onto the White House grounds [timestamp 1:57]. The Secret Service is particular that way.
What Mother Jones found was that many Santos 2020 donors are not real people.
These questionable donations, which account for more than $30,000 of the $338,000 the Santos campaign raised from individual donors in 2020, have not been previously cited in media reports. Mother Jones identified them by contacting (or trying to contact) dozens of the most generous donors to Santos’ 2020 campaign, which he ended up losing by 12 points.
Santos did not respond to a detailed list of questions Mother Jones sent to his lawyer and his congressional office that included names of donors whose identities could not be verified.
The donations are the latest in the Long Island fabulists’ seemingly endless series of political mysteries. Santos has already been caught lying about various elements of his biography including the schools he attended, his religion, his previous employment, his family history, his mother’s death, and having been a volleyball star. He also has yet to explain how he acquired the more than $700,000 he loaned his most recent congressional campaign.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as the fictionalized king of Siam might say.
During Santos’ first run for Congress, only about 45 people maxed out to his campaign during the primary and general elections. In nine instances, Mother Jones found no way to contact the donor because no person by that name now lives at the address listed on the reports the Santos campaign filed with the FEC. None had ever contributed to a candidate before sending Santos the maximum amount allowed, according to FEC records. Nor have any of these donors contributed since. The Santos campaign’s filings list the profession of each of these donors as “retired.”
I did oppo research on our opponent’s donors as a volunteer on my first congressional race. Many obscured their employment by listing their occupation as “executive.” A little Google sleuthing would turn up an oil industry magnate here or a coal baron there.
The task is harder when the donors and addresses are fictional, as Mother Jones found.
These donations suggest a troubling pattern. In campaign filings, names and addresses of contributors are occasionally wrongly recorded. Campaigns do have an obligation to file accurate reports, and they often make efforts to confirm information for major donors, people with whom they want to maintain contact. It is unusual to find a significant number of high-level donors on a campaign filing who cannot be identified or located. The existence of such donations raises questions about the source of these contributions. Talking Points Memo has also reported a case of a Santos donor being charged for contributions he or she did not approve.
Mother Jones adds that several top Santos donors it contacted confirmed that they did make the reported donations. But even one of those had questions remaining.
Santos is already a punchline. It’s only a matter of time before someone turns his life into musical theater.
Videos of police beating Tyre Nichols in Memphis. I just can’t watch them this morning. But a New York Times special report on mass shootings clicked with the reported violence of the policemen who beat the Black motorist (ultimately to death) during a traffic stop.
“Jillian Peterson is a professor of criminology at Hamline University. James Densley is a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University. Together they run the Violence Project and are the authors of ‘The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic‘,” reads their bio in The Times. They intersperse their conclusions about 50 years of mass shootings with terse summaries of what motivated shooters they studied (emphasis mine):
These are abridged details from profiles of the suspected or convicted perpetrators of more than 150 mass shootings in the United States.
The profiles are based on news reports, public documents and our conversations with the shooters’ friends, colleagues, social workers and teachers.
These events have become more frequent and more deadly over time. One-third of all the mass shootings in our study occurred in the last decade.
This is no coincidence. The killings are not just random acts of violence but rather a symptom of a deeper societal problem: the continued rise of “deaths of despair.”
This term has been used to explain increasing mortality rates among predominantly middle-aged white men caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse.
We think the concept of “deaths of despair” also helps explain the accelerating frequency of mass shootings in this country.
Nearly all the killers we profile are men.
Many were socially isolated from their families or their communities and felt a sense of alienation.
Many of these men felt that their identities were under attack.
Often, they turned to extreme ideologies to cope with their failures and to find a sense of purpose.
Most chose not to ask for help when confronted with hardship, like a breakup or being fired from their job.
They chose mass shootings as a way to seize power and attention, forcing others to witness their pain while attempting to end their lives in a way that only they controlled.
These are public spectacles of violence intended as final acts.
Whether it’s self-inflicted, or comes at the hands of police officers or after life in prison, a mass shooting is a form of suicide.
This is something that separates mass shootings from other crimes and is why traditional preventive measures like increased armed security or harsh criminal sentences will do little to stop them.
Mass shooters are not the victims. But in order to prevent future tragedies we must treat the underlying pathologies that feed the shooters’ despair.
Mass shootings must no longer be written off as “inexplicable” episodes of “unthinkable” violence.
Our communities and governments need to find ways to reduce social isolation more broadly and improve access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment.
Increased investment in suicide prevention, crisis intervention and reporting systems for violent threats will help prevent desperate people from becoming mass shooters.
These steps must be taken not in place of but in addition to passing widely supported gun safety laws like background checks, longer waiting periods, safer gun storage requirements and red flag laws.
Instead, we have allowed mass shootings to become normalized in American culture, and ask our children to participate in active shooter drills and pass through metal detectors on their way to class.
We say “never again” and yet less than 48 hours elapsed between the shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, Calif. “Again” keeps happening because mass shooters are not monsters who appear out of thin air.
Mass shooters live among us. They are us. They are for the most part the men and boys we know. And they can be stopped before they pull the trigger.
I’m no expert, but that conclusion sounds dubious. Maybe it would help if the despairing had no trigger to pull. But that’s just me. I wrote the other day, “We will entertain solutions to the plague of gun violence only so long as they do not cost us our guns.”
Police violence is itself a bit of a plague. Is there a connection?
“Many of these men felt that their identities were under attack.”
“They chose mass shootings as a way to seize power and attention …”
How many people choose police work not out of a desire for public service, but as a means of defining themselves and of seizing power and attention? As a means of acquiring the power of life and death exercised under color of law? What “underlying pathologies” are we not screening out in the hiring process? Or are police academies training in pathologies?
I’ve written repeatedly about the “officer survival movement” that trains cops to perceive places they patrol not as neighborhoods but as battlefields to survive each day. Anyone they encounter might be an enemy combatant as though they are not in Memphis but in Baghdad. Cops these days are trained not so much as protectors as warriors.
Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn J. Davis said upon watching videos of her officers beating Nichols (ultimately to death), “You’re gonna see acts that defy humanity. You’re gonna see a disregard for life, duty of care that we’re all sworn to, and a level of physical interaction that is above and beyond what is required in law enforcement. And I’m sure that — as I said before — that individuals watching will feel what the family felt. And if you don’t, you’re not a human being.”
U.S. troops on the whole show more discipline in combat.
The five fired officers (all Black) each “face charges of second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct and official oppression. Four of the five officers had posted bond and been released from custody by Friday morning, according to court and jail records.”
Is it time to consider that people capable of such acts, too, “are not monsters who appear out of thin air”? Like mass shooters, nearly all killer cops are men. Are they “socially isolated from their families or their communities” by their training? Does police training instill a “sense of alienation” that leads them to commit acts that “defy humanity”? Is the sense of power that comes with carrying pepper spray, tasers, and guns what attracts some people to police work? Is it time to consider that police killings no longer be written off as “inexplicable” episodes of “unthinkable” violence?
It’s not my area. But perhaps people whose area it is should burrow into the behaviors of killer police officers as Peterson and Densley have mass shooters.
