EVIL

 

Historian Hannah Arendt, having observed the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann—who was the most important organizer of mass deportations and the Nazi killing centers to actually stand trial for his crimes—coined the term “banality of evil,” which suggested “ordinary people” accepted  the “evil” of a country’s leaders  as “normal” behavior because they believed in the “premises” that motivated their evil. Thus “ordinary people” not only did not see evil actions as “evil” in and of themselves, but that they willingly participated in, or were silent about, evil because they “rationalized” that it was done for the “greater good.” Arendt asserted that such people lacked empathy for the suffering of those their leaders demonized and dehumanized.

Since then, there are those who criticized Arendt’s reasoning that those who participate in evil are not necessarily inherently so and only act in a way in what they and others assume are “normal” responses to what they are told by their leaders. But in the age of Trump, while we may question the level of evil in Trump’s personality, there is no doubt that he has provided “credibility” to what was previously considered loathsome views and behavior that the purveyor was usually too self-conscious of criticism to expose publicly.

Today people in the MAGAverse have no shame about expressing and acting out on the most ignorant and reprehensible views. For example, supporters of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton...

 

 

...overlook his moral and ethical (and legal) crimes by claiming that he is at least fighting “evil,” yet most outside observers of Paxton see him as an inherently evil individual. So what then are we to make of the people who not only do not see his evil, but see “evil” merely in anything they do not like, or are told by people like Paxton not to like?

Here are examples of the most reprehensible faces of evil in this country today:

 

The first needs no further explanation, the second maybe people need some reminding of if there is a second Trump administration, and the third is an example of a state that is run by evil-doers. Before he found an equally racist partner to marry, The New Yorker pointed out this about Nazi-wannabe Stephen Miller:

As the meeting ended, Miller held up his hand to make a final comment. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. His voice dropped. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”

This is a man obviously consumed with hate. Maybe not all of his life these days (I mean, he must "love" his wife), but Miller has certainly made a career of evil masquerading behind a veil of racism which he apparently doesn't believe derives from some dark place that should be hidden and never revealed; Miller is bred on the far-right extremism of David Horowitz, who admitted that Democrats own the “moral high ground”—which I suppose is “higher” ground than the alleged “Christianity” espoused by those like Moscow Marjorie:

“They are secular missionaries who want to ‘change society.’ Their goal is a new order of society—‘social justice.’” He argued that the only way to beat them is with “an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys.”

Horowitz wrote that hope and fear are the two strongest weapons in politics. Barack Obama had used hope to become president. “Fear is a much stronger and more compelling emotion,” Horowitz argued, adding that Republicans should appeal to voters’ base instincts.

So Republicans have told us what they are really about, but who is listening? Horowitz, one of those “disillusioned” former “liberal activists,” reinvented himself since “We are a nation besieged by peoples ‘of color’ trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.” Instead they bring only “crime” and a “hate whitey” mentality.

Miller was an extremely apt “pupil’ of Horowitz, and after he appeared to be unhirable by an reputable law firm after his stay at Duke, Horowitz helped get him a job with another racist, anti-immigrant zealot, Sen. Jeff Sessions, who became Trump’s first Attorney General. Sessions while still a Senator helped kill a bi-partisan immigration bill, which should remind us that Republicans in general are not interested in “fixing” the border, they just like the people to see more “chaos” because such “scenes” appeal to “base instincts,” such as racism and nativism, and voters for whom this appeals to tend to believe that Republicans will "fix" the immigration system, when in fact they have been the major obstacle to doing so. They want you to believe that closing the border and eliminating legal means to immigrate will end the "chaos," and that is no more true than it was in 1965.

A former high school classmate said that Miller was the guy that “nobody liked,” and of course being at a “liberal” school, the direction he went was predictable; since he was white he had privileges and entitlement, and he had to feel superior to someone, and like many who feel “marginalized” and ignored, he retreated into his own world of vengeance and hate. 

At least we can say that Miller didn’t act on his psychological disability by engaging in a shooting rampage, but what he has allowed to do during his time in the Trump administration was hardly less brutal and on a wider scale—and he is still around to do more of it without punishment. Miller and his ilk can only be “punished” by keeping Trump out of the White House, and thus continue to be perceived by those outside his universe as a pathetic (but dangerous) clown.

An article in Vanity Fair notes that Miller is among those in the “frightening world” that Trump is “trying to conjure into reality if he wins back the White House.” It noted that the New York Times had reported that “the former president’s associates have begun plotting behind the scenes to install loyalist attorneys in a second Trump administration who would be more ‘committed to his ‘America First ideology.’ Not only would his lawyers be conservative extremists, like the ones who filled the ranks of his first administration; they would, sources familiar with the planning told the Times, be more willing to do Trump’s personal bidding.” Led by Miller, a former administration official claimed that a second Trump administration would be “staffed by opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”

The only people who can stop this descent into criminality and fascism are voters, but will they? Are many too self-absorbed in their own perceived “victimhood”—some call it “whitelash”—to realize that evil, once unleashed, is difficult to stop once begun and soon consumes themselves. White women who voted for Trump are learning that now, as state and federal courts (including a Supreme Court with three more far-right extremist justices) filled with far-right “culture warriors” no longer feel confined by past precedents that took their “rights” as “settled law.”  “Binary” people, immigrants, ethnic and racial minorities are not their only “targets.”

On the other hand, states like Texas have seen moral and ethical corruption that actually predates Trump, and despite such corruption a majority voters keep electing and re-electing those responsible. The state, according to a Cato Institute study, offers citizens the “right” of a plentitude of low-wage jobs in exchange for sacrificing their individual rights. A CNBC report last year noted the state  has the worst health care system in the country, with the most uninsured and “the second-lowest number of primary care physicians per capita.”

Don’t believe it? When I was working at the airport, the company I worked for had its US-based office in Texas, and they only offered a cheap medical plan by a company called Optimed. Despite the fact the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s office listed it as a “scam” and was illegal for businesses in the state to provide it, it was technically “legal” on Port of Seattle property as long as the “situs” of the company was in Texas, not Washington. And yes, it was worthless, not insurance at all, but “income replacement” which paid a small lump sum and you paid the rest.

Among the rights the disreputable and power-hungry Republican-controlled legislature that is in such fear of losing power is the voting rights of those it doesn’t want voting. It passed legislature targeting solely the Democratic stronghold of Harris County, among other things rolling back voting hours—critical to low-income and minority voters whose work hours usually impose their own restrictions. Meanwhile, Ken Paxton—I mean would you trust this guy...

 

...not to steal your pens if no one was looking…

 

…continues his revenge campaign since his farcical impeachment “trial.” Of course Republicans in the state assume they have the white women’s vote, so Texas also has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, banning any abortion under any circumstance if a “pulse” can be detected.

Texas of course doesn’t believe it has to follow even the most basic rules governing cooperation with neighboring states or the country as a whole. After hundreds died from the 2021 freeze out when the power grid went dead, it still hasn’t been “fixed,” since Texas is the outlier on connecting its system to the national grid; Texas, we are told, does not want to abide by rules and regulations other than its own, which are basically none at all. 

Abbott is no longer even assuring people that there will no longer be blackouts, but that they may have to live with—or possibly die by—them. Paxton, of course, is in all-out war with federal regulations with environmental rules that get in the way of “business,” because since he can’t understand all that jargon in those regulations, they must be “unscientific.”

The Lone Star Project tells us that

The standard for cruelty and corruption has been dramatically lowered by Greg Abbott and (Lt. Gov.) Dan Patrick. It’s hard to be more corrupt or abuse one’s office worse than Attorney General Ken Paxton, but the actions of the two highest-ranking officeholders in Texas meet and arguably exceed Paxton’s debasement. Abbott’s cruelty and Patrick’s corruption combined with Paxton’s criminality expose the real legacy of one-party Republican control in Texas. Morality, values, and the basic standards for decency, ethics, and the law have all been set aside.

The Project calls Abbott’s decade-long exploitation of fear and hatred of migrants has descended into new lows of cruelty and his policies are “nothing short of evil.” Furthermore, “As Governor, Abbott controls the Department of Public Safety leadership. Rather than demand public service and professionalism, he coddles and enables dangerous and heartless incompetence. Abbott has abandoned any claim to value human life or basic human decency.” Rolling Stone concurs:

 

Paxton, meanwhile, has settled his federal securities fraud case, agreeing to pay $271,000 to investors he defrauded, although he still faces charges for improperly firing whistleblowers who reported his crimes—including accepting bribes and using his office to benefit an Austin real estate mogul—that led to his impeachment. But he has a friend in Patrick, who as “presiding judge” of his impeachment trial, intimidated and even threatened jail time to anyone who spoke out against Paxton.

It was revealed that in exchange for ensuring that Paxton escaped justice, Patrick took a $1 million direct contribution and a $2 million loan from Paxton’s Defend Texas Liberty Super Pac. This is the definition of corruption, but in Texas this is just “business as usual” in the eyes of those who think people like Patrick and Paxton are fighting greater “evils” than the evils they are committing. Of course those “greater evils” are doing those things that help people survive in low-wage, low-benefit state and keep them from complaining about it by taking away their voting and civil rights.

The New Yorker, meanwhile, tell us that

“Urging Texans to ‘keep things in perspective,’ Texas’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said on Wednesday that dying is ‘surely not as bad’  as living in a state where he is lieutenant governor. Patrick, whose vehement anti-living message has stirred controversy across the country, said that he was speaking out to remind Texans that there are ‘some things worse than dying.’" 

Patrick made these remarks to Tucker Carlson, suggesting old or sick people should not hang on to life if it hurts businesses in the state from making profits or takes too much of the already limited funds the state sets aside for its nation-worst health care system. Even Carlson seemed to be taken aback by Patrick’s suggesting that there are “worse things than dying.”

Of course, the banality of evil allows these people to be voted into office again and again despite their crimes against humanity. With Trump, it has advanced from the state level to the national level. Rolling Stone reported the other day that

It would not be a Trump rally without him spouting off about the election he lost being rigged and talking in near-apocalyptic terms should he not be reelected this year. “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country, that will be the least of it,” he warned. Later, he went as far as ominously implying that voting as we know it won’t exist if he loses: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country if we don’t win this election,” he said.

Republican lawmakers and right-wing media have rushed to Trump’s defense, claiming words mean “nothing,” just as Trump’s words meant “nothing” on January 6. The better than expected economic growth in this country post-pandemic exposes Trump’s words not as blatant lies about how trade from China is causing a “bloodbath” and will the see domestic auto sales—which saw higher than expected sales in 2023 and is expected to continue to increase in 2024.

We know what Trump is really suggesting here. If he isn’t elected, he expects his fanatical followers to follow der Fuhrer and unleash a “bloodbath” similar to that what we saw on January 6—and probably worse, unless people come to their senses and realize that Republicans do not want to “fix” things, but create the kind of chaos that even they can’t “fix” save for creating the circumstances of a bloodbath.

That of course involves the “border crisis,” which is the issue that Republicans are running on this year, since there is no other issue that they think they can “win” on given that the economy is not as bad as they hoped. This isn’t the first “border crisis” that Republicans have run on, of course; during the 2004 and 2006 elections, the “infestation” of “vermin” was the top drawer subject in their campaign ads. The banality of evil—and the acceptance of the “premises” that people felt “justified” in accepting evil, was inherent in some horrific incidents. This is from a post I wrote in 2014:

On June 1, 2006 Indianapolis police officer Michael Kermon—after failing to calm a hysterical woman outside the residence of relatives on 560 Hamilton Avenue—walked into the house and observed a macabre scene: Seven people—three of them children—murdered in what could only be described as the work of madmen or beasts. An adult male victim was shot five times, with the fatal shot later determined to be fired from a gun pressed against his head.  An adult female victim was also shot five times at close range, while she was kneeling and then while lying on her stomach. A second adult male victim was shot four times in the eyeball. A second adult female was shot four times, at close range in the face. 

A third male victim, a child of 11, was shot three times while lying face down on a bed; the top his head had been blown off;  a fourth male victim, age 8, was also face down on the same bed—except this time he received more bullet wounds than the other victims, eight in total. He apparently had put up a struggle before he was killed, judging from the multiple areas of his body where the wounds were located. A fifth male victim, age 5, was also on the bed, the top of his head blown off.

No, these were not victims of the MS-13 gang, which in fact is responsible for only the tiniest percentage of violent crime by gangs in this country. Neighbors described the victims of the Hamilton Avenue Massacre—then the worst mass killing in Indianapolis history—as “good people” and churchgoers.

Then there was the 2008 incident in Shenandoah, PA where a Hispanic immigrant was repeatedly (and fatally) kicked in the head by white members of the high school football team, apparently in response to the fact he had a white girlfriend; a resident claimed that he wouldn’t have been killed if he wasn’t living there in the first place. He was just asking for “trouble” for living there.

In 2021 I wrote about how it was three years on that the 13-year-old victim of a kidnapping, rape and murder in Lumberton, North Carolina had yet to find justice despite her killer having been long apprehended and the evidence against him conclusive, other than his “mental health.” Now, six years after her nude body was found after an extensive search in a four-foot pit filled with water hidden underneath a plastic table, Hania Aguilar…

 

…is still waiting for justice. Go ahead and say her name, you racist hypocrites like “Moscow Marjorie.”

The Indianapolis and Lumberton cases have certain things in common besides their victims being Hispanic: they didn’t know their killers (unlike what the “profiler” in Hania’s case asserted); and that the perpetrators committed their crimes on the assumption that Hispanics were all "criminals," “drug dealers” and thus had lots of “money.”  I suppose some people would find it "hard" to determine who is the criminal in this picture:

 

Hania’s mother must continue to suffer six years after her daughter’s murder by a non-Hispanic US citizen (the current trial “date” is “possibly” this summer) because the “defense” has convinced the court that every discovery of new evidence against the killer must necessitate a delay so they can build a defense case of “mental incapacity.” Of course the truth is that the killer has a lengthy criminal history dating nearly twenty years—including two cases of assault against children, serving nine years in prison for a home invasion in which he shot a woman, and, according to the Charlotte Observer,

October 2016: “A man, identified two years later by police as McLellan, removed an air conditioner, crawled through a window and sexually assaulted a woman at knifepoint.”

October 2017: “The Robeson County district attorney’s office and the sheriff’ office were notified by the state crime lab that DNA from the 2016 rape kit matched McLellan. The sheriff’s office did not pursue the case further.”

In the Indianapolis case, some people didn’t like “Mexicans” in their neighborhood, and a couple of “gangstas” wanted to “teach the Mexicans a lesson” by “hitting a lick”—the same term that Hania’s killer used when he informed friends what he was going to do, before getting sidetracked and shoving Hania into a running SUV while she waited to be driven to school—assuming they would find a safe, cocaine and money. That is what the mainstream media and far-right politicians had told them. When they found none of those things (neither did police), the killers, armed with an AK-47 and assorted handguns, went “crazy.”

Did anyone learn any lessons from these killings? During the 2004 and 2006 elections we were hearing the same kind of anti-Hispanic rhetoric we are hearing today. Trump was using viciously dehumanizing and demonizing language about Hispanics when he first announced he was running in 2015, and the mass shooter who perpetrated the 2019 El Paso killing spree freely admitted that he was influenced by such rhetoric. Even though studies have shown that illegal immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than “legal” residents, far-right politicians and media latch on to any bit of convenient anecdotal evidence and recycle it endlessly to give the impression of a crime “epidemic.”

This includes “squatting” all of a sudden. Squatting is hardly a “new” problem, in fact the original European settlers in the US could rightly be called “squatters,” especially those settling on the “frontier” in what was Native American land. During the Great Depression millions lost their jobs and homes, squatting in “Hoovervilles,” like this one on the Seattle waterfront:

 

I mean this is what you expect under Republican political control.  For New Yorkers, they shouldn't be “surprised” by the presence of “squatting”; in 1969, we see Joe Buck wondering about his new “home” he is now sharing with Ratso Rizzo:

 

The Washington Post is reporting that “squatting” is actually much less common than people are being led to believe, but all it takes is one or two incidents involving “migrants” and it is off to the races for white nationalists and racist media. The Post tells us that

Squatting is extremely rare, according to experts — so rare that there is no reliable data available on the number of squatters across the country. But with a handful of high-profile cases of property owners going to court to evict illegal residents, a right-wing media frenzy and the introduction of state bills, the topic has become ubiquitous.

But regardless of the numbers, a NYU study even back in 1988 tells  us that “the low-income housing crisis in the City is so severe that even strategies as controversial as squatting must be seriously considered if they can add a significant number of low-income units to the City’s housing stock.”

Most cities tend to look the other way with squatters as long as they are out of sight—or before they “accidentally” set fires for heating or cooking, like this (then permanently, now removed) abandoned apartment in Seattle:

 

But if a “squatter” is a migrant, the right-wing media goes ape-shit, and everyone is expected to be enraged by the audacity of people who have to wait months or even years to receive work permits in this country despite the fact that there is plenty of work for these people, just that the government are forcing employers to sit and wait for “native” labor that never arrives to fill certain undesirable jobs.

And of course, rather than recognizing the need for labor that only migrants seem to be available to fill, people like Abbott (who deserves a second round of exposure), who one resident describes thusly…

 

…and is proven himself as one of the most incompetent managers of a state (as noted previously, Texas still has not made the necessary fixes of the electrical grid that caused hundreds of deaths in the 2021 deep freeze), has chosen rather than fixing the red-tape logjam that the bi-partisan US Senate immigration bill addressed but was rejected by those who want the “border crisis’ to continue as their number one political cannon fodder (in fact a new poll released by CNN suggests that more voters blame Congress than Biden for the continuing “crisis”), Abbott only seeks to make the “crisis” worse so he and his police can act like gangstas. He certainly didn’t learn any lessons from El Paso massacre, so the next question is when the next mass shooting targeting “Mexicans” occurs and who should take blame for it.

Of course one must hide the evil within them. As a follow-up to my last post, when JFK first proposed a new immigration policy, his main objective was to abolish the Bracero program, which he claimed would increase wages and jobs for American citizens. In fact, neither one of these things happened. According to a study of old records reported by Politico, jobs previous filled through the Bracero program did not lead to higher wages, and there was no substantial increase in employment numbers among “natives.” Instead, when agribusinesses realized that "natives" were not rushing to fill those jobs, they began to move to mechanized “labor.” Otherwise, migrant labor—instead of engaging in the cross boarder traffic that kept their stay “temporary,” simply decided to remain in the country because farmers who were facing labor shortages welcomed them back, and this only led to the increase in “illegal” traffic.

JFK died before his immigration proposals became law, but pushed by civil rights activists who saw migrant labor as a “threat,” and those in Congress who proposed to put numerical limits on the number immigrants from the Western Hemisphere while proposing higher quotas from elsewhere, it was “promised” that the new immigration law signed by LBJ would not lead to a major increase in non-white immigration. This belief was fueled by past history when the vast majority of immigrants (until the 1924 immigration law) came from Europe, initially from northern Europe, and then from “inferior” southern and eastern Europeans, which led to the more restrictive immigration law in the first place.

LBJ and those supporting the new immigration who assumed that Europeans would again comprise the larger number of new immigrants were wrong. Eastern Europeans under the Soviet block were restricted from leaving their countries, and Western Europeans were seeing increasing economic and political freedom in the post-World War II era, thus had less motivation to immigrate.

But it gets worse, as we see then true evil behind immigration policy toward Hispanics. Michael Clemens wrote in Politico that

Prior to our work, no one had ever systematically tested whether the exclusion of braceros achieved its economic goal. Historians had focused almost entirely on the politics. Kennedy’s beliefs about the economic effects of the braceros relied on the findings of a Department of Labor commission that hadn’t actually analyzed economic data and was, in fact, led by Rufus von KleinSmid, charter member of a society of eugenicists that had advocated blocking Mexican immigration, believing that Mexicans constituted a genetically inferior race.

Von KleinSmid (a suspiciously German-sounding name), was influenced by the man who wrote this “academic” paper:

 

When was this tome written? In1929, when the racial “eugenics” theories became a hot item in certain nativist circles, especially in Nazi Germany. Thus one of those “CRT” stories that we are not to feel “bad” about or even confess criminality about is the “persuaded” or forced “repatriation” of at least hundreds of thousands of “Mexicans”—most of them US citizens—to Mexico with little more than what they could carry during the Great Depression, so that the “natives” could take their jobs, while the Japanese internees got the taxpayer-funded barracks living and eventual “sympathy” and compensation ($20,000 would have been a lot of money back in those days).

This is about people essentially being permitted to disguise their own evil, or that which they remain silent about because they either don’t care or “accept” that there is a grain of “truth” to wild stories that demonize and dehumanize that must be “addressed” anyways. I can tell you from personal experience that I have notice things becoming much worse in since I was a kid, even when I was held on the ground by a gang of white kids who stuffed grass in my mouth. Did they think they were “evil”? I thought they were, and still do.