Category Archives: Politics

Donald Trump’s Dark Tetrad

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A while ago I posted the transcript of a video by Lucas Bean about how Donald Trump became the monster that he is. This video dives deeper into the man’s personality traits, and goes a long way to explaining why he acts the way he does. The transcription is mine, there may be errors but if they exist, they are minor. For a clear picture of what Trump is and how he got that way, it would be instructive to watch both of these videos together, or read both posts.

You can watch the original video here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/2456629481475440

Transcript:

I’ve been wondering for years why the Trump cult attracts the cruelest people in the country, so I decided to do some research on dark personality psychology to understand what’s actually going on here.

He mocked a disabled reporter on live tv and the cult loved it. He called for violence at his rallies and his followers cheered for it. Federal agents attacked non-violent people in the streets and his base defended it, and said they should have just complied.

This isn’t a political movement; this is a cult enjoying the suffering.

In 2013, researchers at the University of British Columbia, identified a specific cluster of dark personality traits that explain who gets drawn to hateful movements like this. They called it “the dark tetrad,” four dark personality profiles that love to watch people suffer. And when you map these four traits onto the Trump cult, everything that looked insane starts to make sense.

Trump didn’t accidentally attract these people, he built something specifically designed for these people.

Here are the four dark psychological traits that make up the Trump cult:

1: Narcissism

Trump supporters see themselves in Trump. He says what they think, he hates who they hate, he fights the people they’ve always wanted to see humiliated. So when you tell his followers that he’s a liar, they don’t hear facts, they hear an attack on themselves.

Psychologist Otto Kernberg at Cornell University spent decades studying why certain people can never admit they are wrong. He called it narcissism. Narcissism is the belief that you’re better than everyone else built on a lifetime of feeling insecure. The majority of narcissists were created by authoritarian parenting and abusive households, a home where being wrong was punished, where showing weakness was dangerous, where the only safe move was to comply, perform, and never question the person in charge.

That defense mechanism doesn’t turn off when they grow up, it just finds a new authority figure to organize itself under. The narcissistic brain doesn’t process criticism the way a normal brain does. Criticism isn’t information, it’s an attack on their entire identity. The brain registers criticism the same way it registers physical danger. Narcissists do no self-reflect, they retaliate and the longer they stay in the cult, the more they have to lose. Admitting Trump is a fraud means admitting they destroyed relationships and wasted years for nothing. The brain will do anything to avoid that pain. They destroy every relationship in their life defending a man who doesn’t even know their name and never will.

Trump knows exactly who these people are. He just put up a 22-foot gold statue of himself at a Miami golf club, he’s putting his face on the US passport, he’s building a 250-foot gold arch in Washington, D.C. He’s not governing the country, he’s performing for the people who need someone to worship. He didn’t create their narcissism, he just knew exactly how to feed it. And once a narcissist decides you are the enemy they will burn everything down before they admit that they were wrong.

2: Machiavellianism

Trump lies consistently and openly. His supporters know this and they love him more for it, because for them lying isn’t a character flaw, it’s proof that he’s smarter than everyone else who’s trying to stop him.

In 1970, psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Guise at Columbia University identified a personality type built entirely around manipulation and power and they called it Machiavellianism, the belief that the world is a game of power and the only real morality is winning that great game at all costs. Machiavellian fathers create Machiavellian children, homes filled with harsh punishment, emotionally cold parenting, and early exposure to manipulation. When a child grows up where trust is weakness and power is the only currency that matters, the brain adapts. It learns that the world is a game and the only way to survive is to play it better than everyone else, no matter whom it hurts.

People wired this way don’t see manipulation as wrong, they see it as intelligence. They see honesty as weakness. Facts don’t fit the game they are playing, power does… and in the game the only move that matters is loyalty to whomever is winning, so they don’t question him and Trump makes them feel like loyalty is power. He calls them patriots. He said they figured out what everyone else is too weak to admit. That feeling of being on the inside is exactly how the manipulation works. You can’t see the con when  you think you’re in on the con.

When you believe that everyone is playing an angle, you can never trust anyone – not your friends, not your family, not even the man you gave your vote to. These people will spend their entire lives being manipulated by the one person they thought they finally understood. He took their money through fake foundations and worthless degrees. He called them “the forgotten Americans” and then forgot about them. The second the rally was over, they gave him their vote; he gave their tax cuts to billionaires, their healthcare to lobbyists, and their jobs to the same system he promised to destroy.

3: Psychopathy

His supporters see the same news everyone else sees; they hear the same stories, they watch the same footage, and they don’t care. They feel nothing. Psychologist Robert Hare at the University of British Columbia spent decades studying people who felt nothing for other people; he called it psychopathy, the complete absence of empathy for anyone outside their group. Children who experience severe neglect, abuse, or chaos early in life show the same neurological abnormalities as an adult diagnosed with psychopathy. Their empathy doesn’t disappear, it gets deactivated as a survival mechanism.

In a normal brain, when you see someone suffering a signal fires. It’s automatic and it’s involuntary. That signal is what makes cruelty feel wrong. In a psychopath brain, the signal is absent. Other people’s pain produces no internal response, so there’s nothing to overcome, nothing to rationalize. The suffering of strangers is simply neutral information to them. What fills the void in these people is dominance. The psychopathic brain does not ask who is right, it asks who is winning, and whoever is winning gets their total loyalty, no questions, and no guilt. That’s why a psychopath can watch a child get taken from its mother at the border and call it a deterrent.

Trump tries to act like the most powerful person in the room every single day, and to a psychopath that’s all they need to see to follow him forever, or until his perceived power wears off. When you can’t feel other’s pain, you also can’t feel your own pain. These people aren’t just indifferent to the suffering they cause, they’re cut off from the full experience of being human, and Trump knows exactly how to aim that emptiness at everyone he needs them to hate. They’re not making a mistake about him, they know exactly who he is: he’s the most powerful person in the room and he hates the same people they hate. That’s not a political opinion, that’s a personality built for cruelty, and Trump built his entire cult just for them.

4: Everyday sadism

Trump supporters don’t cheer for policy, they cheer when other people feel pain. They cheered when Trump mocked a disabled reporter, they cheered when families were separated at the border, they cheered when Trump talked about roughing up protesters, they cheered when Trump talked about putting his enemies in prison. The crowd isn’t cheering despite the cruelty, they’re cheering because of the cruelty.

In 2013, psychologists Aaron Buckles and Delroy Police identified a fourth dark trait which expanded which expanded the Dark Triad into the Dark Tetrad. They called it “everyday sadism.” Everyday sadism is the enjoyment of causing pain or humiliation to others. Sound familiar? The research on its origin is thinner than the other three traits; what we know is that it shares genetic roots with psychopathy and shows up early in childhood.

Whether they were born with the cruelty or the cruelty was modeled by their parents, the results are the same. They have a brain that finds pleasure in what other people find horrific, and when the cruelty escalates, they don’t look away – they cheer louder for it. Buckles and Pollis also found that everyday sadism is the single strongest predictor of internet trolling. These aren’t people who enjoy arguing online; they actively hunt for victims and enjoy every second of it.

Now, look at what a Trump rally actually is. It’s not a policy event, it’s two hours of watching people get mocked, threatened, and humiliated while a crowd cheers. That’s the product. That’s what they paid to see. Everyday sadism is the one trait that predicts willingness to work for the opportunity to hurt someone – not just when it’s easy, to put in actual effort for the chance to hurt someone. When cruelty is the only thing that makes you feel powerful, you need more of it to feel the same effect every time. The targets have to get more vulnerable. The humiliation has to get more public. The suffering has to escalate, and it always does. That’s not a political movement, that’s an addiction, and Trump knows exactly what they came for.

This is what the Dark Tetrad looks like when it finds a political home. Four personality traits built by abuse, drawn to cruelty, and organized around a man who delivers it on demand. They are a fringe minority of broken and damaged people, and the only reason they feel powerful is because they found a man willing to weaponize their cruelty. They think they have permission to be cruel, to be hateful, and they think that they’re going to get away with it. They are wrong.

Trump didn’t build a political movement, he built an angry rage-filled mob of cruel people, and he has been feeding that mob every single day since.

Many people display one or more of these traits, but watching Donald Trump as president and considering his past actions as a real-estate developer and otherwise failed businessman, it’s easy to see how he admirably displays a toxic combination of all four characteristics of the Dark Tetrad.

I have known cruel people in my life, both in school and at work, and they are most unpleasant to be around. There is no reasoning with them. If you show any weakness at all, you’re just opening yourself up for even greater abuse because they see you as an easy target and they will zoom in for the kill. The only way to stop a bully is to make sure that the price they pay for their depredations is higher than the satisfaction they get from tormenting you. Turning the other cheek does nothing, Informing authorities does nothing. A hard sock in the nose or a solid kick in the hoodie-doodies is usually enough to make them back off and find easier targets for their cruelty.

Sadly for America, Trump has never experienced personal consequences for his cruelty, surrounding himself as he does with a cadre of purchased attorneys willing to make sure that he always avoids significant blowback.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

How Donald Trump became the monster that he is.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A TikTok video by contributor “dh479.710” (later identified as Lucas Bean) explains in excruciating detail how Donald Trump became the cruel, chaotic person that has caused so much destruction to our government and our nation. I’m not sure who this individual is, but from where I sit he absolutely nails it, and so I felt it worthwhile to transcribe his video and present it here for your consideration. You can watch the full video at TikTok.

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Transcript:

I’ve been wondering for years how Donald Trump became so cruel, and so sadistic. So I decided to do some research on child trauma and dark psychology to understand what’s actually going on here.

He mocked a disabled reporter on national television and laughed. He called for violence at his campaign rallies time and time again and reveled in it. (See “Personal Observations” below)

He stood in front of crowds and fantasized about jailing his political enemies while the crowd cheered.

In 2020, Donald Trump’s own niece, a clinical psychologist named Mary Trump, published a book¹ explaining exactly how her uncle became this cruel.

Trump sued her for $100 million to stop the book from being published; she published it anyway.

Here are the five childhood events that turned Donald Trump into who he is today.

1: The Mother who disappeared

Donald Trump was two years old when his mother was hospitalized for six months following a series of emergency operations. She nearly died, and when she came back she was never really quite the same.

Psychologist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London identified what happens to a child when the primary caregiver disappears during the first two years of life. He called it “maternal deprivation” – the complete failure of the attachment bond at the exact moment when the brain is learning whether other people can be trusted and whether other people’s pain matters.

Bowlby found that children who lose their primary caregiver before age 2 develop what he called “affectionless psychopathy,” the permanent ability to feel remorse; the permanent inability to feel empathy; the permanent inability to form genuine emotional bonds with other human beings.

Donald Trump was 2 years old. His brain was forming its first understanding of what other people are. And the person who was supposed to show him that other people matter simply was not there.

Mary Trump described her grandmother as “ghostly absent” for most of Donald’s childhood. A woman who attended to her children when it was convenient for her, not when they actually needed her. Mary Trump argues that her uncle has never watched another human being suffer and felt anything. Not the disabled reporter, not the separated families at the border, not the people dying without healthcare. The person who was supposed to teach her that other people matter was not there and nobody else ever filled that gap.

2) The Brother his father destroyed

Donald Trump’s father had two sons. Donald’s older brother Freddy was the firstborn. Freddy was kind, Freddy was sensitive, and Freddy loved people. Freddy Trump wanted to be a pilot more than anything in the world. His father called Freddy weak every single day. He mocked him at the dinner table in front of the whole family constantly. When Freddy apologized, his father mocked the apology too. He would repeat it back in a sneering way. His father wanted a killer. Freddy was a human being and his father destroyed him for it. Mary Trump, Freddy’s own daughter, documented what happened to her father. She wrote that Donald Trump’s father dismantled Freddy by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality until all that was left was a man who hated himself and spent every day trying to earn the approval of a father who would never give it.

Freddy became an alcoholic; he lost his pilot’s license; he ended up doing maintenance work for the family business. He died at 42, broken, invisible, and alone.

Trump’s father did not just destroy Freddy; he used Freddy as a live lesson to Donald. “This is what happens to weak people in my household. This is what being sensitive gets you. This is what happens when you feel things.” Freddy was not weak. Freddy was the only one in that family who made his daughter Mary feel loved.

Trump’s father destroyed the kindest person in the family and made Donald watch every single day. Donald never forgot the lesson as he watched his brother get destroyed daily and never spoke to defend him.

3) The moment Donald chose to become his father

Watching was not enough for Trump’s father. Donald did not just observe what happened to his older brother Freddy – he participated. Mary Trump documented that Donald began mocking Freddy alongside his father. He learned to sneer at his brother’s sensitivity the same way his father did. He learned to call Freddy weak. He learned to degrade him in front of other people. He chose his father’s side completely and permanently.

Anna Freud, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th Century, identified the mechanism that produces this exact behavior in 1936. She called it “identification with the aggressor.” When a child cannot escape an abuser, it cannot defeat them, the brain chooses a third option: become the abuser. Adopt their cruelty. Perform the humiliation on the target. Make yourself indistinguishable from the thing that terrifies you so you don’t become the target. Anna Freud found that this is not a completely conscious choice. If you become the aggressor, no one can use the aggressors tactics against you. But a child pays a price for that safety. Mary Trump describes what it cost Donald in clinical terms.

She wrote that Trump’s father short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings, his father perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. Trump’s father did not just destroy Freddy; he used Freddy’s destruction to cut Donald off from his own humanity. He made Donald the monster he was. Mary Trump argues her uncle Donald has not felt genuine empathy for another human being since he was a small child sitting at the dinner table, learning to laugh while his brother was destroyed in front of him.

Donald didn’t lose his humanity, his father³ Fred took it from him.

4) Malignant narcissism

In 1964, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm identified the most severe personality pathology in clinical history. He called it malignant narcissism. The combination of four traits that together produce what Fromm called the purest form of evil a human being can become: 1) narcissism 2) paranoia 3) antisocial personality and 4) sadism. Fromm said malignant narcissism represents the most vicious destructiveness and lack of humanity that psychology has ever documented. This is not ordinary cruelty, it’s cruelty that feeds on itself, cruelty that needs to escalate, cruelty that is never satisfied.

Trump has mocked a gold star family³ on national television. He has suggested that a female journalist was bleeding from a facelift. He called a gold star widow who had just buried her husband, and fumbled her husband’s name, and told her that he knew what he had signed up for. She said it made her cry even worse. In my opinion, those are not political acts, those are the acts of someone who experiences other peoples’ pain as entertainment.

John Gardner, a psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins medical school for 28 years, applied Fromm’s concept of malignant narcissism to Trump specifically. He called it the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible in a leader.

In 2017, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book called 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝐶𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑑 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝. They said their duty to warn the public superseded professional neutrality; they put it on record. Mary Trump, who sat across the dinner table from Donald for decades and holds a PhD in clinical psychology said he meets all nine DSM² criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. She said he will never change. She said the damage was done too early and too completely. She wrote that Donald continues to exist as he was at 3 years old: incapable of growing, incapable of learning, unable to regulate his emotions or take in new information. And the country gave this three-year-old the most powerful office in the world.

5) Why he needs the chaos.

Trump’s presidency has been defined by one thing above everything else: chaos. Daily explosions, constant firings, threats in every direction. Reversals that make no sense. A government that bounces from crisis to crisis without ever stopping. Mary Trump argues this is not incompetence – he does it because it feels familiar to him.  Chaos is the only environment her uncle has ever felt safe in.

Sigmund Freud identified this pattern over a century ago. He called it “repetition compulsion,” the unconscious drive to re-create the conditions of your original trauma in childhood – not because you want to suffer, but because familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar calm.

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades studying how childhood trauma rewires the brain. He found that people who grow up in chaotic households don’t just tolerate chaos as adults – the recreate it, because calm feels like the moment before something bad happens. Chaos feels like home. Donald Trump grew up in a house where his father destroyed people at the dinner table every night for fun. Where nothing was safe. Where love was withheld and cruelty was the only currency that mattered. That was his normal from the day he was born, so when he got power he recreated the chaos. The daily explosions, the firings, the threats, the reversals, the cruelty aimed at every direction at once.

Van der Kolk’s research suggests this is not incompetence – Trump recreates chaos because chaos is the only thing that has ever felt like home, and now the entire country lives inside chaos. This is what happens when you emotionally destroy someone at a young age. A mother who vanishes at the exact moment the brain learns how to treat other people; a father who tortured his oldest son in front of his younger son every single day; a younger son who watched that torture and chose to become the torturer and the abuser rather than defend the older brother; a clinical diagnosis that 27 psychologists put on the record; a man so traumatized by his own childhood that he needs the entire country to live inside chaos with him.

Mary Trump documented all of it. She watched it happen from the inside. Donald Trump’s older brother Freddy paid for it with his life. Donald paid for it with his humanity. And the rest of us are paying for this damaged person’s reality right now.

End of Transcript

Personal observations:

For those who doubt Trump has mocked a disabled reporter:

This event in 2015 alone should have been the absolute end of his candidacy in 2015, but the nation’s hateful contingent was already fully in favor of Trump’s cruelty.

You don’t think Trump has ever advocated violence? We won’t even talk about January 6th, 2021.

As I read of Fred Trump’s destruction of his son Freddy, including mocking his apologies, was immediately put in mind of the depiction of Denethor son of Ecthelion in the Lord of the Rings movies. This is exactly how he was depicted in his treatment of the favored son Boromir and the rejected son Faramir, and it was painful to watch. This devastating exchange happens in “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” Before Faramir rides out to retake Osgiliath, Denethor tells him he wishes Faramir had died instead of Boromir. Faramir turns back and asks, “If I should return, think better of me, father,” to which Denethor chillingly replies, “That will depend on the manner of your return”. Excruciating cruelty, portrayed with horrid accuracy by John Noble.

The description of Fred Trump’s hatred of weakness is echoed in detail in a mini-essay by xenophonsXiphos; I have bowdlerized it slightly for a family-friendly blog.

I have experienced this kind of sadistic, passionate hatred for perceived weakness in my own life, as early as 1963. Bullies abound in the world, and they cannot be appeased. The only courses of action is to become like them (witness LeFou and Gaston in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,”) or to hit back at them so hard that they find an easier target with fewer consequences. They can not, sadly, be taught the error of their ways. What is certain is that in the American school system, while administrators crow loudly about their “zero tolerance policies,” these are nothing more than lip service to a problem they do not care to deal with and end up punishing victims often more than perpetrators. Not hard to understand why things like Columbine happen.

Footnotes

¹ Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

² Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

³ A “gold star family” is a family who has lost at least one member to military conflict. During World War II, it was common for people to hang service flags in their window to indicate how many family members were actively serving n the military, blue for living and gold for deceased. In August 2024 the Red Star Service Banner was created by the Red Star Foundation. Creating a symbol of hope and recognition for the families who have lost a service member or veteran to suicide. On January 28, 2025, Rep. Jack Bergman (MI) read the Red Star Service Banner into the Congressional Record. You can still see these flags in many windows today.

Three-star service flag, indicating three family members in the service with one casualty of war.

The poison of Christian Nationalism

Posted on by The Old Wolf

In the Appendix to 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑎𝑛 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑆𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒 by Frederick Douglass (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), Douglass wrote:

“I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the 𝑠𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛 of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. 𝐈 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐮𝐫𝐞, 𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭: 𝐈 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭, 𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧-𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐞-𝐩𝐥𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐲𝐩𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝. [Emphasis mine]. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.”

The entire appendix – nay, the entire book, but the appendix is a representative summary of Douglass’ thought – is a short but compelling read, and I recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand the foundation of hate in Christian Nationalism.

The following text is a representation of how this attitude showed up in 1965, and which persists today, to the great shame and detriment of our society.

“The hate stare was everywhere practiced, especially by women of the older generation. On Sunday, I made the experiment of dressing well and walking past some of the white churches just as services were over. In each instance, as the women came through the church doors and saw me, the “spiritual bouquets” changed to hostility. The transformation was grotesque. In all of Montgomery only one woman refrained. She did not smile. She merely looked at me and did not change her expression. My gratitude to her was so great it astonished me.” Griffin, John Howard, Black Like Me.¹

Given the gross disconnect between the Christianity found in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, and the behavior of far too many² of those who profess to be followers of Christ in the current timeline, it is no wonder that so many people are turning away from mainstream Christian churches, citing loss of belief, negative experiences, LGBTQ-related concerns, scandals, and politics.

As a nation, we must do better if we are to have a country that works for everyone, with no one left out. R. Buckminster Fuller expressed this idea in what came to be known as his “World Game,” after which this blog is named:

“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ Black Like Me, first published in 1961, is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin recounting his journey in the Deep South of the United States, at a time when African Americans lived under the Jim Crow laws. Griffin was a native of Mansfield, Texas, who had his skin temporarily darkened to pass as a black man. He traveled for six weeks throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia to explore life from the other side of the color line. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.(Wikipedia)

John Howard Griffin as a Black man, walking under an arcade in New Orleans, Louisiana. Photograph by Don Routledge.

² It goes without saying that there are countless people in all Christian denominations who do their best to emulate the teachings of Jesus and go about, in a quiet and unassuming way, doing good. These are they who form a bulwark against the flood of openly-practiced hate and division of the hypocritical Christian Nationalists.

A Toast to One’s Own Downfall

Posted on by The Old Wolf

It is almost impossible to describe how primitive Trump’s approach is and how much joy it brings to the enemies of the USA: After his suicide as a superpower, America will find it difficult to regain its status.

Guest post by Timothy Snyder in the Süddeutsche Zeitung

The United States is spending billions of dollars to lose a war against Iran that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes its citizens, damages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. The war reveals a guiding principle of US President Donald Trump ‘s foreign policy : superpower suicide. Empires rise and fall, but to my knowledge, no state has ever intentionally and systematically destroyed its own power—certainly not with such speed.

Note: The original Article in English – “America’s Superpower Suicide” – is at Project Syndicate, but is behind a paywall. This is a German translation by Jan Doolan. (Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026) which has been back-translated by Google translate. It’s a poor substitute for the original English, but the text is important enough that I felt it should be shared.

This strategic suicide is hard to admit: one still hopes that Trump’s failures are based on some understanding of the US national interest . They are not.

A superpower must at least be a modern state that—through the rule of law and other institutions—encompasses a substantial number of citizens committed to a common goal. But the Trump administration treats the US not as a modern state, but as a business opportunity for a select few.

To remain a superpower, a state must also be able to sustain itself over time. Continuity depends on a principle for the transmission of political authority. By striving to remain in power indefinitely and undermining trust in elections, Trump is challenging the very principle that enables political succession in the United States. There are, of course, other ways to achieve this, such as dynastic rule or a politburo decision. A transition to either of these forms—one could imagine the circle of tech oligarchs responsible for the rise of Vice President JD Vance as a capitalist politburo—would spell the end of the American republic.

The Trump administration has gutted the civil service and replaced the military leadership.

Ensuring the right people are in positions of power is crucial for a state to gain and maintain power. Throughout history , powerful states have found various ways to identify qualified individuals and promote them to leadership positions, regardless of their background. Ancient China had a system of examinations. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life.
The US, for its part, once had a civil service the world envied, as well as a highly merit-based military. But the Trump administration gutted the civil service and replaced the military leadership—a process overseen by people unqualified for the positions they held. The fact that Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth are now Director of National Intelligence, FBI Director, and Secretary of Defense, respectively, is a clear indication that a superpower is committing suicide.

In a deeper sense, a superpower must have an education system that prepares its population, and thus its political leaders, to face global challenges. But in Trump’s USA, public education is being defunded, universities face reprisals if they defend academic freedom, and school libraries, including those at military academies, are being purged of useful books.

Similarly, the appreciation of science, which fueled the rise of many great powers, has come under attack in Trump’s USA. Like the ancient Mesopotamians, whose astronomers developed scientific methods for mapping the heavens, and the Romans, who used the scientific knowledge of the Greeks to build an empire, the USA became a superpower by creating government institutions to fund science and attract scientists—often immigrants.

However, the Trump administration has launched a shocking offensive against science. It is withholding research funding for political reasons, preventing aspiring and established scientists from moving to the US, and questioning fundamental scientific findings such as human-caused climate change.

Even if Trump’s new battleships were built, they would be completely unsuitable for modern warfare.

As a result, the Trump administration abruptly halted the energy transition in the US and instead increasingly subsidized ecologically and economically obsolete fossil fuels. As a superb forthcoming book demonstrates, societies that embrace new forms of energy rise; those that do not perish. This may be the most profound truth in human history and makes Trump’s decision an existential error that will accelerate the decline of the US and empower China—its main competitor and the global clean energy superpower .
The same applies to the technology and innovation that underpin military power. The US has always spent enormous sums on armaments. Yet the administration is focusing on equipment of the past, including a new class of battleships to be named after Trump . The plan is a complete pipe dream. Even if these battleships were somehow built, they would be utterly unsuitable for modern warfare, the contours of which have been laid bare by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine. They can be considered doomed from the moment they are launched.

The Ukraine war is a prime example of how the Trump administration disregards the art of diplomacy in favor of “deal-making.” Yet there is ample evidence—including his kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin—that Trump doesn’t know how to negotiate. Furthermore, US allies are vilified and ostracized for no other reason than personal grievances .

Without a sense of national interest, there can be no understanding of the purpose of alliances. Nor can there be any appreciation of the international system—the laws, rules, and norms that underpin US global dominance. It is almost impossible to describe how primitive Trump’s approach is and how much pleasure it brings to the enemies of the United States.

The war against Iran is a strategic defeat; to the extent that the US had any objectives at all, they were not achieved.

This brings us back to Iran. In international confrontations, a superpower wins at least sometimes. But the Trump administration loses time and again. The war against Iran is a clear strategic defeat; to the extent that the US had any objectives at all, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have resulted in more enriched uranium remaining in the hands of an even more radical Iranian regime, which possesses new sources of economic power (control of the Strait of Hormuz; intimidation of the Gulf states), and have made it virtually impossible for the US to exert any influence on Iranian society.
The government also celebrates defeats in symbolic ways, as is characteristic of declining states. Consider Hegseth’s comparison of the rescue of a downed US pilot to the resurrection of Jesus—a blatant blasphemy that could distract us from the underlying strategic helplessness. Such Christological imagery is used to transform a defeat in the real world into a victory in an imaginary one. Polish Romanticism, for example, viewed the collapse of a republic (primarily due to wealth inequality) as proof that Poland was the “Christ of nations.”

Finally, many states are losing power because they simply cannot afford to maintain it. For the first time since 1945, US national debt is higher than gross domestic product. A useful point of comparison: large deficits are normal when facing a challenge like World War II. But the Trump administration is running these deficits for a very different reason: to avoid taxing wealthy individuals and corporations. This approach—which views the government as a service provider for the super-rich—is incompatible with winning wars or maintaining the social services that make a modern society function.

Reforms and corrections are no longer relevant, because the suicide of the US as a superpower under Trump is a symptom of the democratic distortions and inequalities that enabled such a world-historical strategic folly in the first place. What made the US a superpower also enabled the current attempt at self-destruction. Instead of striving for a return to the former status quo, intensive efforts must now be made to reshape US policy so that people are given more power to create a more just future.

Dear USA: When You Were Awesome

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This sad love letter to the USA was written by one of our civilized Aussie mates and posted on Facebook. The good folks down under like to use a lot of spicy language for emphasis, but I try to keep my shares family-friendly so I’ve taken the liberty of bowdlerizing this entry, and I hope I’ll be forgiven. But if you want to read the essay in all it’s glory, you can click here.

You might be cool, but you’ll never be purple safari suit cool.

Dear USA: When You Were Awesome

A letter to America from the boy in western Sydney who was once your biggest fan

May 14, 2026

I was 5 years old at Saint Mary’s South Primary School when I first fell in love with you.

Her name was Miss Hess. Blonde hair. An accent I’d never heard before in my whole short life. I remember her standing at the front of our kindergarten classroom and being absolutely mesmerised. I asked her where she was from. She told me she was from the United States of America. Somewhere down south. Alabama, maybe. I don’t remember exactly. I didn’t even know what a United States even was at the time. What I remember is the way the words came out of her mouth. The roll and lilt and warmth of them. They sounded like the films we’d already started watching. They sounded like everything good.

A 5-year-old in western Sydney doesn’t have the words for “I am infatuated with my kindergarten teacher because she’s from a magical place.” But I was. Completely. And from that moment, you had me.

That’s how it started. With a blonde American lady at the front of a New South Wales classroom, telling a barefoot Aussie kid about the country she’d come from.

You can build the rest of a life on a foundation that small. I did.

Because you were the greatest country on the face of the bloody earth. Everyone knew it. Everyone said it. The dream was to go there one day. To stand under the Statue of Liberty and look up. To stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look down. To walk over the Golden Gate Bridge. To get a photo at the Empire State Building. To lose your shirt at a Las Vegas card table. To take your kids to Disneyland. To eat a hot dog in Times Square.

You sent us Hollywood and we ate it whole. You sent us Indiana Jones and Marty McFly and Han Solo. You sent us Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. You sent us the moon landing on grainy footage and we watched it in school assemblies. We were hypnotised by the technologically of an advanced civilisation as if we were still rubbing two sticks together trying to discover fire.

When Crocodile Dundee went to New York, I went with him. Every Aussie kid did. We sat in our lounge rooms half a world away and walked the streets through Mick’s eyes and the whole thing felt close enough to touch. Like maybe one day, we’d get there too.

When I was a teenager, my uncle bought a Rambler Matador. Big American sedan. Chrome you could see your face in. Then a Rambler X. Big two-door coupe. He called it the big American job and I’d run my hand down the panels like I was touching a piece of the country itself. I felt so proud sitting up in that front seat turning heads everywhere we’d go.

He’d go to Vegas every chance he got. Come back with stories. The casinos. The lights. The buffets the size of a school hall. The way the air conditioning hit you when you walked into a hotel lobby. The way the dealers called you sir. The way the whole place seemed to exist on a scale Australia couldn’t compete with.

I’d sit there as a teenager and listen to him with the same wide-eyed awe a 5-year-old had for Miss Hess. You were still the dream. Still the place. Still everything good and big and possible. The richest people on the face of the earth. Wall Street. Manhattan. Texas. California. The kind of country a kid from western Sydney could only get to by saving every coin for a decade.

Friends would come back from their own trips with their own stories and I’d absorb every one of them. The skyline at night. The redwoods. The size of a steak. The taste of a Coke from a glass bottle. You were a country, and you were also a feeling, and you were also a promise.

And then one Tuesday morning your towers fell.

I remember exactly where I was. I remember the heaviness in my chest that didn’t lift all day. I remember the pounding headache that wouldn’t quit. I remember feeling physically ill in a way I couldn’t put words to, because what I was feeling wasn’t shock or fear, it was grief. The grief of a kid watching the older brother he idolised get sucker-punched on live television.

We watched the people jumping. We watched the firefighters running in. We watched a country built on optimism take the worst hit of its history. And we cried for you. Not the polite kind of crying. The proper, shoulder-shaking, can’t-believe-this-is-happening kind.

We had our own dead in those towers too. Australians who were just there for work, for love, for a long weekend. They died with your dead and we mourned them together.

It was the Musketeer thing. All for one. One for all. That’s what we were to you and that’s what we believed you were to us.

And when you went to war, we went with you. Bush invaded Iraq on the back of a lie about weapons of mass destruction and somewhere deep down a lot of us knew it was a stretch. But the wound of 9/11 was still raw and we were not going to leave our mate alone in a dark room. So we went.

Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Three of the bastards. Wars you started. Half of which were wrong before the first boot hit the dirt.

But we didn’t cut. We didn’t run. We sent our blokes, our brothers, our dads, our cousins, our schoolmates, to fight beside yours. We buried our diggers under flag-draped coffins. Long Tan. Tarin Kowt. The whole bloody mess of it. We stood with you because that’s what mates are meant to do. Even when you’d screwed it up. Even when the cause was wrong. We showed up.

Because that’s what the little boy at Saint Mary’s South had been taught to do. That America was worth dying beside. That the bond was real.

But somewhere along the way, you started losing your mind in public.

It happened gradually at first. The kid from the kindergarten classroom, now a grown man, didn’t notice it straight away. He noticed Hollywood went a bit dark. He noticed your news started screaming. He noticed your politicians stopped looking like leaders and started looking like grifters. He noticed your churches got loud and your guns got louder. He noticed the kids getting shot in their classrooms while you did nothing. He noticed Charlottesville. He noticed Ferguson. He noticed the slow grinding way you couldn’t seem to fix the things you used to be so proud of fixing.

The boy from Miss Hess’s kindergarten was watching his older brother slowly come apart on the kitchen floor.

And then you elected him. Twice.

A man found liable in your own courts for sexual abuse. An adjudicated rapist. A convicted felon. An insurrectionist who sent a mob to murder his own vice president and then watched it on the telly with a Diet Coke. A thrice-bankrupt steakhouse hustler. A spray-tanned pardoner of pedophiles who took his pen, once back in the Oval Office, and walked rapists and child abusers out of prison because they wore the right hat on the right day.

This is who 77 million of you chose. Not once. Not Twice. Third time the charm. With more votes the second time than the first.

The boy from Saint Mary’s South could not believe it. Refused to believe it the first time. Wept the second.

And how did this bloke repay the country that bled beside you for half a bloody century? He disparaged the free trade deal we’d signed in good faith. Slapped tariffs on Australia. On Canada. On Britain. On every mate who’d showed up when it mattered.

After Long Tan. After Tarin Kowt. After every coffin we sent home from a war you started. He treated us like an enemy.

And then he set about the rest of the world. Threatened to annex Canada like it was a Monopoly square. Threatened Greenland. Belittled prime ministers in the Oval Office on camera. Disparaged NATO. Cuddled up to Putin while telling Ukraine they were on their own. Shook down friends. Rewarded dictators.

The little boy who loved you would not have recognised the country you’ve become. He would have closed his picture book and asked Miss Hess where the real America had gone.

But before I go any further, I need to say this clearly. Because there’s a version of this letter that lumps every single one of you in together, and that version is not just unfair, it’s wrong.

I am not talking to the critical-thinking Americans.

I am not talking to the millions who saw this coming and tried to stop it. I am not talking to the women who marched in Washington. I am not talking to the unions. I am not talking to the teachers showing up in red states to teach actual history. I am not talking to the lawyers fighting this in court. I am not talking to the doctors quietly performing the procedures you’ve made illegal. I am not talking to the journalists getting fired for telling the truth.

I am not talking to Jimmy Kimmel. I am not talking to Stephen Colbert. I am not talking to Seth Meyers and John Oliver and Jimmy Fallon. I sit on the other side of the Pacific and I watch your monologues at 8 o’clock in the morning over a long black and I laugh and I cry and I say out loud to Mitzy, “These bastards still get it. These bastards are still in the fight.”

You critical-thinking Americans, you are not the country I’m writing this letter to. You are the country I still love. You are the country Miss Hess told me about, before things went sideways. You are the version of America the little boy in the kindergarten classroom was infatuated with. You haven’t gone anywhere. You’re still in there, fighting like buggery, and I love you for it.

I’m with you. The rest of the world is with you. We see you. We hear you. We feel your pain. We are not turning our backs on you.

But we are turning our backs on the 77 million.

We are turning our backs on the brain-dead imbeciles. The Fox-marinated cousins. The QAnon mothers. The church-going hypocrites with the gun safe in the rec room. The Confederate-flag-flying pensioners. The silent-majority golf-cart Republicans who knew exactly what he was and voted for him anyway. The 77 million morons who looked at a man bragging about grabbing women by the pussy and a list of 30-something felony convictions and said yes, this bloke, this one, this is the one I want running the country my children will inherit.

And yes. The good Americans are going to suffer too. The tariffs will hit your blue-state retirees. The recession will hit your union households. The collapse of soft power will hit your students abroad. We know that. We don’t want that. It breaks our hearts. But there is no version of the world’s response that punishes only the guilty and spares only the innocent.

We’re all suffering. We’re all going to keep suffering. And if it takes the rest of the world turning its back to make the 77 million finally understand what they have done, then so be it.

We have tried polite. We have tried diplomatic. We have tried hand-wringing. None of it has worked.

So the world is going to send the only message left. Withdrawal of trade. Withdrawal of trust. Withdrawal of admiration. Withdrawal of immigration. Withdrawal of tourism. Withdrawal of the assumption that you are the leader of the free world. The kind of message that gets through skulls thicker than two short planks.

And it might, just might, drag a few of the lazy non-voters off the couch next time. The ones who weren’t going to vote for him but couldn’t be arsed voting for anyone else. The ones who let this happen by sitting it out. Maybe when they see how bad it gets, they’ll find their way to a polling booth in 2026 and 2028 and actually do their bit.

And there’s one more thing I want to say, and it’s to the Democrats.

When you win it back, and you will, you have to actually fix it this time.

You don’t get to go back to the way things were. You don’t get to coast on the relief of him being gone. You don’t get to spend the next 4 years patting yourselves on the back for being the adults in the room.

Because what made him possible was 40 years of neoliberal rot. 40 years of offshoring. 40 years of stagnant wages. 40 years of healthcare bankruptcies. 40 years of pretending trickle-down was real economics and not a hostage note from the donor class. The germination of Trumpism is in the soil you helped till. You and the Republicans both, but you, the Democrats, were supposed to be the bulwark, and you sold out to the same donors and now here we are.

So when you get the keys back, you have to dig the rot out. Tax the bastards. Break up the monopolies. Fund the schools. Cancel the medical debt. Build the housing. Stop pretending Wall Street is the economy and Main Street is just there to applaud.

And throw a boatload of criminals in prison.

Him. His cabinet. The lawyers who helped. The senators who looked the other way. The donors who funded the coup attempt. The judges who shielded him. Build the cages and fill them. And keep them in there, year after year, in their orange jumpsuits, so that the next would-be Trump, and there will be a next one, knows exactly what is waiting for him at the end of the road.

Accountability is not optional. Accountability is the only vaccine.

The grief is the worst part. Not the rage. The grief.

It’s the grief of a man in the Blue Mountains who used to be a 5-year-old in Miss Hess’s kindergarten, sitting at his desk, trying to explain to his readers why the country he grew up loving is now the country he can’t bear to watch. It’s the grief of an older brother going off the rails and not being able to drag him back. It’s the grief of watching the Statue of Liberty become a hollow joke. It’s the grief of watching Captain America turn into the bloke he was created to fight.

You used to be awesome. You really did. And we loved you for it. Not as a satellite state. Not as a junior partner. As a friend. As a mate. As something close to family.

But the little boy is grown now. And the older brother has lost the plot.

So the rest of us, the Aussies, the Kiwis, the Canadians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the South Koreans, all the kids who used to look up to you, we’ve had to grow up too. We’ve had to become the adults in the room. We have to hold the line on democratic norms. We have to keep climate policy alive. We have to stand with Ukraine. We have to defend the rules-based order that you wrote and are now spitting on.

The student has become the teacher because the teacher has had a stroke and is yelling at the wheelie bins.

And it breaks my heart. It really does. Because somewhere in me there is still a 5-year-old at Saint Mary’s South Primary School, looking up at a blonde American kindergarten teacher with stars in his eyes, wanting you to come back. Wanting Miss Hess to be from a country I still admire. Wanting the McDonald’s and the moon landing and the Bruce Springsteen songs to belong to the country I loved. Wanting Captain America to be a hero again. Wanting to look up.

But the boy is a man now. And the man is sad. And the country he grew up loving is gone.

We will love what you used to be for as long as we can remember it. And we will mourn what you’ve become for the rest of our lives.

And when you come back to us, if you come back to us, we will be here. Heartbroken. Tired. Older. But still your mates. Because in the end, that is what we are.

We just need you to come back. We miss you.

IFLA ~ Gman

Shared with love by The Old Wolf

Burning the GOP

Posted on by The Old Wolf

https://xcancel.com/TheRoot/status/2054698203489214848

Transcript:

—-

A Louisiana resident who identified himself as Marshawn delivered a fiery, emotional speech to lawmakers during a state Senate hearing over redistricting Monday, accusing Republicans of trying to “cheat” Black voters out of political power.

—-

“I have no doubt in my mind that the map’s going to pass, if y’all could give us less than zero seats you would do it. 

Y’all do this under the orders of someone who says the civil Rights act was harmful to white people, that it caused Reverse racism. 

RFK [Jr.] said that black children are overfilled on antidepressants and that they need to be re-parented on different forms, all of them. 

Pete Hegseth constantly brings Doug Wilson to the Pentagon to give a prayer service. Doug Wilson is the same pastor that said slave owners were on strong spiritual ground.

I don’t have no belief on no morality on anybody that follows Donald Trump.

If you wasn’t with this map, you wouldn’t be underneath this President, you wouldn’t be in your party.

You would stand up, you would stand against it, you would speak out about it. 

So as far as I’m concerned, if you here as one of these Trump Republicans, you already showed us who you are. You showed us what you want to do. And I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party.

Y’all are in a death spiral. That’s why you have to redistrict. That’s why y’all have to cheat. That’s why Trump got to go to Texas and say he entitled to five more seats. It because y’all know what y’all is doing is abhorrent. 

We letting our people die in Iran based on false pretense, that Tulsi Gabbard and Joe can’t say it ain’t real. 

Y’all okay with all that. So I’m positive that y’all goin’ be ok with the map. But the beautiful thing is, the children that y’all have made, and the people that’s younger than y’all, don’t support none of this racism that y’all want.

The MAGA party is the last breath of the Confederacy, and I’ll be happy to see the millennials and gen z bury y’all. There will be no more of your party. The midterms gonna come and y’all gonna get wiped out. 

Trump gonna get dragged out of the White House, and I’m gonna love every second of it. Because y’all loved every second of the suffering that he caused to everybody in this country, and worldwide.

We starvin’ Cuba. We bombed Nigeria. We holdin’ Zimbabwe and Zambia hostage for they minerals. We don’t want to give them AIDS support. The pro-lifers that say “all life is special,” y’all letting kids die of AIDS. What part of your Bible say that? Point out the scripture. I think everybody would love to see it. And we would love to see y’all in the midterms.”

—

After this powerful speech, the Republican in charge tried to hit back with this weak-sauce “neener neener” response: “Your hat says, ‘Trump was wrong about everything.’ It should say ‘You are wrong about everything.’ “

Marshawn clapped and said, “Adorable. Burn!”

An Open Letter to Chief Justice Roberts

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This beautiful letter was written by “Lucinda Law” (@Cindy Lineberry) and published on Facebook. It deserves wider exposure, so I repeat it here in its entirety.

Dear Justice Roberts,

It has come to my attention through your various media appearances that your feelings are hurt — that people view you and your Court as political actors, which you insist is not an accurate understanding of what the Court does.

So let me resolve the confusion: the misunderstanding is yours, not ours.

People believe your Court is political because it is and acts so in plain view of the nation.

You unleash unlimited corporate money into elections by inventing constitutional protections for concentrated wealth. You dismantle voting protections while dining with the very political movement that benefits from their destruction. You expand presidential immunity in ways conveniently favorable to a corrupt executive you have rewarded with extraordinary deference, 90% deference. And then you perform public astonishment when Americans recognize your pattern.

Your Court did not merely “interpret” the Constitution. It selectively hollowed it out whenever democratic participation threatened entrenched power.

Citizens United accelerated America’s transformation into an oligarchy where billionaires and corporations wield more political influence than millions of citizens combined. Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act, after which states moved with remarkable speed to burden the very voters the Act was designed to protect. The immunity ruling signaled that sufficient power can place a president beyond meaningful accountability.

Then you publicly mourn the collapse of trust. What exactly did you think would happen?

Legitimacy is not something a court grants itself while issuing ideologically convenient outcomes wrapped in constitutional language — when the public is fortunate enough to even receive a full opinion instead of another consequential ruling buried in the shadow docket.

Legitimacy is earned through restraint, consistency, ethical seriousness, and fidelity to principle even when principle is inconvenient to power.

This is precisely the credibility your Court squandered. We understand perfectly well what we have been watching. We all see you and your court and its role in what our nation has become.

And we are furious — not because we are too ignorant to understand constitutional law, but because we are capable of reading the Constitution you claim to defend- while watching this Court repeatedly twist it to serve its own ideological will.

History will remember this era. And it will remember you and your Court- not as a guardian of constitutional democracy, but as a key institution that eroded it. That is already your legacy, so stop whining- you earned a nation’s scorn.

I wholeheartedly endorse this letter to the chief justice of the most illegitimate, compromised, partisan SCOTUS that has existed in my ¾ century of life. Only three of the justices currently strive to interpret the Constitution as it was written – a document designed to create a world that works for everyone, with no one left out. The other six? Well, not so much.

These six are determined to turn the United States into a Christian Nationalist Autocracy, and have ruled in favor of Trump and MAGA and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda in more cases than I ever thought possible. When this regime falls, as fall it must, they will be remembered with the kind of historical opprobrium reserved for the worst societal outcasts – people like Joseph McCarthy, Boss Tweed, or Andrew Johnson.

“Sir, are you trying to show your contempt for this court?”
“No, your honor, I am doing my best to conceal it”

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The State of the Nation – Jon Stewart’s Monologue

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Delivered on 1/16/2026.
Auto-transcription cleaned up a bit. Some errors are possible.

Watch the segment here. It’s a corker.

Jon Stewart Monologue 1/18/2026

“What the is happening? What the [bleep] is happening in this country? From Minnesota to Venezuela to Iran to Greenland, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia to Philadelphia. Well, well, oh, I’m sorry. Not all the news was bad. Why is the president of the United States declaring on Wikipedia that he is now the president of Venezuela? That’s real. Why is our Fed chairman making what appears to be a hostage video? How does steak become the healthiest food in the country? What is happening? We are on the Donald Trump gravitron. We don’t know what up or down is. We just know it feels like we’re all going to vomit.

Each moment brings another event with cataclysmic implications and consequences. And the guy at the center of it, the instigator, the catalyst of all this chaos and confusion, he’s just out there TGIFing it. Oh, hey, what’s up everybody? Hey, see you soon. Not if I see you first. Boom, boom, boom. Just look at Venezuela. We took it over what, 3 days ago, four days ago, 5 days ago, I don’t remember. Meanwhile, our State Department says if you’re an American, there are armed gangs in Venezuela trying to kill you. So, you would think that maybe this calls for a little gathering in the situation tent or wherever is operationally right for talking about Venezuela right now.

But the president had a different idea. President Trump convening top oil executives at the White House to talk about diving up Venezuela’s oil. What the [bleep] is happening? He has a meeting of all of the most important stakeholders. Exxon, Chevron, Halliburton, and of course the guy from Dune who lives in the oil bar. By the way, I think you can tell I don’t use that treatment. And by the way, lest you worry that Donald Trump is in any way feeling the burden of this moment, the terrifying responsibility of so many lives held in his hands, let me reassure you, he’s fine. Here we are.

And if you, in fact, if you look, come to think of it, well, I got to look at this myself. [Trump gets up and walks to the window]. Sir, and we’re trying to have an urgent meeting on possibly the collapse of a pro state. You just got to walk over to the window, and look at look at Rubio and Vance. Look at look at the faces on Heckle and Jeckle over there. Just look at him smiling like “oh pawpaw, he’s so cute you should see him when the ice cream truck goes by.” What a what a view this is, the door to the ballroom, well, what a job! Really this meeting is the moment for your funny ballroom act them out armed gangs are roaming freely through both of the countries you say you run right now. But go ahead, take a moment to look at what might be through the window. You’re like the Walt Disney of chaos. All it takes is imagination.

And by the way, if you’re getting up and walking through the window and you don’t think that’s enough of a doddering old man move, old man, old cankles McGee had one more chewable Tums up his sleeve. You’re all going to do very well. I think really very well. Marco just gave me a note. Go back to Chevron. They want to discuss something. Go ahead. I’m going back to Chevron Mark. Thank you, Marco. Does anyone else have a private note they’d like me to read aloud? Anybody? Now, by the way, there was an oil company, Exxon, that expressed some reservations about investing money in rebuilding the infrastructure of a country that is uh, and I quote, not ours and is somewhat volatile at the moment. How did the president handle this somewhat rational cost benefit analysis? I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute. They’re playing too cute. You just made yourself the president of Venezuela on Wikipedia, but they’re the ones that are being glib. Do you see how [bleep] up everything is right now? First of all, I have to offend the good faith of an oil company because they don’t think they can safely extract another country’s resources in as cost-effective a manner as might benefit their shareholders. Who am I anymore? And by the way, Donald, why are you the president of Venezuela? Doesn’t your oath of office to America have a non-compete? What are we doing? What are you just trying to pick up a few extra hours? What? The holidays hit you hard. I just need a little couple extra bucks until like February, March. That ballroom’s not going to pay for itself.

Meanwhile, in Iran, protesters have taken to the streets tired of the totalitarian rule of the Mullahs and have been gunned down in the streets. Protests and violence have broken out throughout that country. It is chaotic and fragile. So, guess who’s thinking about stepping right in? That’s right, the president of Venezuela. I have options that are so strong. So, I mean, if they did that, it’ll be met with a very, very powerful force. I have options. Did you hear what he I have options? Not Congress, not the American people. I apparently Trump is the sole factor in all decisions everywhere throughout the world. Now he just wants to take a little more time staring out the window before he lets us know what fresh hell he will unleash next. And the most confusing thing about his reason for intervening in Iran is his reason.

President Trump has warned of striking Iran if the regime kills protesters. There seem to be some people killed that aren’t supposed to be killed. We may have to bomb Iran to prevent Iran’s government from shooting protesters. Look directly into camera with an expression of half bewilderment and despair. P.S. John. Don’t read this part. And if that’s not enough, in the middle of all this, we are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not. I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way. It’s Greenland. Based on my knowledge, everything there is done the hard way. You know, when you order food in Greenland, Uber Eats takes eight days and they don’t deliver over fjords. So, the point is, people, don’t fill up on Iran and Venezuela and Minneapolis. You got to save room for this other invasion. It’s like a WHOLE MUKBANG OF CATASTROPHIC POSSIBILITIES. It’s exhausting. This is all just one weekend. And why do we even need Greenland? We need Greenland very badly. Why? And why do we suddenly need all of Venezuela’s oil and whatever is buried under Greenland? What is Can I ask a question? Are we broke? Is that why we have to do all this? Did you lose your job? Did you somehow Trump casino the United States? Cuz if the country needs money, we can all get second jobs. We’ll all be presidents somewhere. If Wikipedia will have us. I don’t unerst…Why do we have to take over Greenland? “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland and we’re not going to have Russia or China as a neighbor.” We’re already [bleep]. Russia’s already our neighbor. This is where Greenland is. Russia’s closer. Unless in your mind you think Alaska lives in a box next to Hawaii. No, no, no. I get it. I get it. I get it. We don’t want Russia or China to take over Greenland. Oh, you know what we could do to deter it? Not through arrogance or conquest, but what if we formed like kind of an alliance with Denmark and Greenland? We could include all the North Atlantic nations. What would we call this? like almost like a North Atlantic treaty organization that we… I don’t know what we could I guess we’ll never know. But again, since we all now dance to the tune of one piper, what possible justifications could you have for just taking someone else’s land? And please, if you would irony proof your answer. I’m a fan of Denmark, but you know, the fact that they had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn’t mean that they own the land. Can someone pass him a note? How do you think we got our land? We landed here on a boat 500 years ago and it was ours. And you’re out there. Hey, Denmark doesn’t own it because they landed on it 500 years ago. That’s like the argument you make when you want to give land back to the people who were already there, not for you to then take it because you’ve got a bigger boat. You’re doing some weird reverse woke land acknowledgement. I would like to acknowledge that Greenland sits on colonized and conquered indigenous people’s land. And I would also like to say dibs. Why am I even trying, by the way? Why do I even care to figure this out? It’s not like anyone on your side ever takes the effort to convince all of us on uh the United States long-term policy goals. It all just appears to be like a lazy Susan of vengeful whims from our all powerful mad king.

Did you know Trump doesn’t like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell? Because Trump wants to be able to dictate our country’s interest rates himself. Now this poor Jerome Powell. Now you got him looking like he’s broadcasting from Taliban territory. The Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned in part a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings. Can someone get this mother a glass of water? And by the way, I don’t feel good about this next joke, but I’m about to do it. It’s not It’s not politically incorrect. It’s just inside finance. So, anyone who doesn’t listen to Bloomberg surveillance in the morning, you can just leave the room. I’ll wait. Okay. Wow, that dude, he’s struggling. It appears the chairman of the Federal Reserve is having a liquidity crisis. That’s going to kill at the terminals!

I’m going to remind you all of this is happening in one weekend. All of it. One weekend. This president has made monumental changes to the manner in which this country operates. And the American people are rightfully feeling a vertigo about how a country born on self-determination and constitutional republic principles can turn into “whatever you say boss, sounds like a good idea boss.” So I think the American people reasonably have questions. But when the American people raise those questions… “Do you think Iran takes your threats seriously.” [Trump:] “What a stupid question. Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? It’s a stupid question. Just a terrible question. You are a terrible reporter. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter. You know nothing about love. You fake news. Quiet, quiet Piggy.”

How dare we? How dare we? How dare we question his Excellency? I don’t know what we were thinking. You know what? I’m so We owe you an apology, sir. Mr. President, sir, we are so deeply sorry to have questioned your singular and delicate genius. It’s just that this is a kind of an adjustment for us because we’ve all been raised in the American system of government. I’m not going to get into the weeds with it. three co-equal branches of government checks and balances something about quartering soldiers. I think it’s quartering. It’s in cursive. The Q could be a P or an S. The point is this. That’s what we’ve been operating under for the last 250 years. If you want to learn about it, President Trump, you can ask all your acolytes. They say they keep it in their pockets. I guess it’s kind of a relic. So just have to give us some time to adjust to this new world of total compliance so we can understand the rules because you know it’s confusing. Like for instance, we all watched the footage of January 6th. But I think we may have gotten a very different interpretation of it rather than the correct interpretation of it, which of course is yours. So help me out here. We’ll play a game.

On January 6th, a bunch of they were peaceful people. These were great people went to the capital peacefully protesting a stolen election. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love. But while they were there, Capitol Hill police officers instigated the violence that day. So the people we saw earlier beating the [bleep] out of police officers were hardworking, loving people provoked by law enforcement and ultimately they deserve a full pardon. Got it. Don’t agree that’s what actually happened or what should have happened afterwards, but at least it sets a precedent.

But now let’s jump ahead. I don’t know a day to January 7th. We’ve all seen that footage. I think I know what I saw that day, too. But let’s go through it again with the correct interpretation. On January 7th, a highly disrespectful, deranged lunatic woman, professional ICE agitator, domestic terrorist, did what? This woman used her car as a weapon and tried to run over an ICE agent, an attempted murder, and so she was shot and killed. So while very little of the descriptions that you were saying matched what we all saw on the tape, the important lesson here is what she brought it upon herself. Mother, we are in a confusing dark place and this is where quite frankly rule of law and institutions are kind of an important framework. But now that those are gone, what’s our north star? Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to? Yeah, there’s one thing. My own morality, my own mind. So, nothing. But thank you. I’m no longer confused. Couldn’t be more clear. In America today, Donald Trump is the sun. And if you revolve around him and worship him, his warmth shines upon you. You could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his support as long as it’s done on his behalf. But if you do not support him, if you live in the darkness of what I guess we will refer to from now on as blue states, fearing the day he turns his terrible wrath towards you, whether you’re a single human woman on a side street somewhere in Minneapolis or a sovereign nation that happens to have land and resources that we, a larger sovereign nation, think we also might want. And so his people are making a bet that adhering to a principle of forced compliance and coercion will give us a more stable and prosperous America than a principle of shared alliance and common interest. It’s kind of a tough bet because uh I read somewhere I don’t know where that people have inalienable rights granted by a creator not a king. So holding that coerced world together it’s going to be kind of a tall task. But if anybody’s up for it, it’s Donald Trump. A man with unrivaled focus and discipline. Actually, you know what? Could you give me a second? I’m just, you know, I’m so curious. [Goes to window] I just want to just go and see….”

End of segment

If America – including Congress – does not rise up and put an end to this madness, our Republic, which was handed to us by the founders, will have truly been lost. We’re already on the cusp of losing it, by having elected this mad conman not once, but twice. May God have mercy on us all.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

You Must Not Sleep! – Arnulf Øverland

Posted on by The Old Wolf

From Boktips.

“Arnulf Øverland (1889 – 1968) was a Norwegian author, poet, and nationalist. “Du må ikke sove” (You Must Not Sleep) was published in 1937, and is seen as a warning against Nazism and what was to come.

During the war, Øverland wrote several famous resistance poems, and was imprisoned in Møllergata 19, Grini and Sachsenhausen. He survived all three, and after the war became involved in the Norwegian language struggle as chairman of the Riksmålsforbundet (“The Riksmaal Society – The Society for the Preservation of Traditional Standard Norwegian”).”

We should be paying attention to what is happening in America today, instead of sleeping. This is reminiscent of Ben Franklin’s warning, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Original Norwegian and English translation side-by-side

The Old Wolf has nothing more to say, Øverland has said it all.

America’s Far-Right movements

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This video by Ronan Farrow clearly delineates the main far-right movements current in America. There are others, but these are the dominant ones infesting our society, and it helps to understand them.

Ronan Farrow

Below you will find the transcript of his remarks:

“In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination there has been a lot of discussion about the “far right” movement he was part of. But the “far right” is a spectrum of different movements, and understanding them might help you understand what is happening in America.

First, Christian Nationalism. This group’s leaders, like Kirk and Marjarie Taylor Greene, tap into valid frustrations with broken systems, but also exploit xenophobia and racism. They believe that the US was founded as, and must be restored to a Christian State. For many of them, that means white dominance and nonwhite immigration and multiculturalism are threats. Kirk himself said, “You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population” and called the Civil Rights Act a “huge mistake.”

The movement works within the system, and its leaders don’t openly call for violence, but their rage baiting rhetoric has inspired it, with adherents participating in the January 6th attack.

A different strain is the Techno-authoritariarian or Dark Enlightenment movement, pushed by Curtis Yarvin and Silicon Valley billionaire supporters like Peter Thiel.

They hold that democracy has failed, and want an authoritarian society run like a corporation, by an  unelected CEO-monarch and enforcing a stratified racial hierarchy based on pseudoscience.

Finally, a view gaining ground across the far right is accelerationism. That’s the belief that society is byond saving and its collapse needs to be hastened.

This view is held by many within the Groyper movement, which is led by Nick Fuentes and seeks to establish a white, Christian, anti-Semitic, authoritarian state.

It’s named after its racist meme toad mascot. Fuentes avoids direct calls to violence, but his followers rely on online harassment, including threats of violence against political opponents and minorities. Some were also charged for their rôle on January 6th.

The Boogaloo movement on the other hand explicitly calls for violence against the government. Its name drawn from memes about the ’80s movie “Breaking 2, Electric Boogaloo” is a reference to a second civil war. Self-described ‘boogaloo bois” have been convicted of domestic terrorism plots and murders of government officials.

A more personal nihilism is embodied in the Black Pill worldview, which cuts across these movements. Its adherents often identify as incels and they want to destroy the progressive society that empowered women to reject them. The name comes from The Matrix, which is ironic. Since that film’s directors have said that the pills were a trans allegory.¹ Black pill followers are mainly misogynistic, but they have a lot of natural overlap with white supremacists

Most are passive, but the philosophy has inspired several mass murders.

People in this country are hurting. They are frustrated with systems that are rigged against them. You can see how those anxieties are exploited in these groups and their visions from building an authoritarian state to just watching the world burn.

Footnotes:

¹ I never knew this, but yeah, it’s a thing.