Here is how to report news, via a New York Times journalist:
This is all purely factual, but these are also facts that allow anyone who isn’t a fascist and/or a sadist to draw the appropriate conclusions.
I don’t believe the extent to which sadism is fully appreciated — that is, a sexual orientation which consists of getting erotic pleasure out of inflicting pain, or witnessing pain being inflicting on others — because sadism is a key component of the devolution of the American right wing into fascistic authoritarianism..
I know it sounds awfully judgy to conclude that Pete Hegseth et al are perverted freaks, who see extreme violence not as a tragic consequence of the nature of modern state, but rather as sexual enhancement tool, but the evidence for this proposition is all around us, and growing every day.
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The social ubiquity of stupidity remains relatively unappreciated and under-analyzed, although it would seem that the Trumpist era is rapidly doing its best to remedy this situation. Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brief essay on the subject, now more than 80 years old, remains one of the few notable exceptions to this rule. Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Nazis in the year before Donald Trump’s birth, but at this historical moment his words resonate perhaps more powerfully than ever:
In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
This is, given Bonhoeffer’s fate, eerily similar to the conclusion Hannah Arendt reaches about one of the chief architects of the Nazi mass murder, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann’s crime, per Arendt, is at its core “the inability to think.” Eichmann is guilty of genocide and stupidity; or more precisely he is guilty of genocide because of his stupidity. His malevolence is a product of his stupidity, and vice versa. History may well reach a similar judgment about the man who is even now leading America into catastrophe.
In a prescient essay entitled “The Triumph of Stupidity,” published in the year the Nazis came to power in Germany, the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted:
Given a few years of Nazi rule, Germany will sink to the level of a horde of Goths. What has happened? What has happened is quite simple. Those elements of the population which are both brutal and stupid (and these two qualities usually go together) have combined against the rest. . . . The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
This morally and politically toxic combination of brutality and stupidity was on full display at the beginning of the war on Iran in March of 2026, when the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth indulged publicly in sadistic revels about all the destruction and death he and his boss raining down on the people of that nation. In a particularly disgusting display, Hegseth treated his audience in a grotesque description of Iranian sailors drowning in the Indian ocean, after their ship was torpedoed by the US Navy. It was revealed the next day that the ship was largely defenseless when it was attacked, because it had been participating in an international naval exercise at the invitation of the Indian government. A few weeks later, Hegseth used a press conference to continue his onanistic fantasies about dropping bombs on his fellow human beings, despite the fact that one of these exercises in “lethality” had already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls, after the apparently accidental bombing of their classrooms:
I witnessed lethality. I met a junior airman as the sun was going down and a chill was setting on the tarmac, who, when asked what they needed, she simply looked at me with a sly smile on her face and said, more bombs, sir, and bigger bombs. We will happily oblige her.
Indeed, reading World War II-era authors such as Arendt and Russell today, it’s difficult to avoid being struck by how many top Nazis and Trumpists share the same basic social profile, which is to say they were and are lifelong catastrophic failures, who failed upwards under conditions that turned out to be ripe for such people to ascend to positions for which they were farcically unqualified. This description fits people like Eichmann, Himmler, and many other Nazis to a tee, with the very best example being, of course, Adolf Hitler himself.
On the Trumpist side the examples are equally plentiful, from Hegseth, to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to, most crucially, Trump himself: a man who spent decades managing to be a human disaster of astonishing proportions, despite inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars, and all the immense privilege that goes with such good fortune in our society.