Some people are more fascinated with evil than others. The biggest rage in the office is the series “Dahmer” on Netflix. Everyone has been trying to get me to watch, but I’d be watching solo at home. I don’t necessarily want to see evil or watch it described, but the idea of sociopaths and psychopaths interests me as someone that has a masters in counseling and has dabbled in some abnormal psychology.

I picked up a book at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago and was finally able to crack it open. Mind you, I haven’t finished it but I found Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen to be a fascinating read so far. The biggest breakthrough was in the terminology itself. He doesn’t use terms like good and evil. Instead he talked about empathy. Some people have a lot of it and some people have a little or zero real empathy.

As someone interested in mental health, this revelation brings a number of questions that I hope he has answers for. For instance, is empathy something innate that some people simply lack or is it something learned from our environment? For instance, he was able to show different parts of the brain and explain what was happening on a physiological level when someone’s empathy was impaired. Can we successfully teach empathy? Can we develop an empathy pill for those that have biological reasons for a lack of empathy?

What strikes me most of all is that terms like “good” and “evil” come with significant value judgments attached. Empathy can be measured. We may not have a perfect measurement, but we can certainly do better than “evil”. One can say that they are doing something for the good of mankind and yet conduct themselves without a shred of human empathy.

Cohen described it like a spotlight. Those that have empathy have two or more spotlights. One is on them and their thoughts and needs. The other spotlight(s) are on others and their thoughts and needs. Those with zero to no empathy have only one spotlight. There are times in all of our lives when we are down to one spotlight. It happens. Something horrible happens or we feel more vulnerable for one reason or another. However, that condition is just temporary. When our lives stabilize or the crisis abates then our empathy returns to normal.

Yet, what we are seeing is an increasing amount of people that are stuck on one spotlight. Again, I wish I knew whether this was learned behavior or somehow organic. What I do know is that this is a more substantial description of potentially dangerous people than simply calling them evil. After all, a person with a single spotlight can seem good as long as their ends seem in line with everyone else’s. When their interests and the interests of others collide then watch out. Until we can get a pill at the local pharmacy we need to make sure we don’t give those folks too much power.

We naturally assume we would know when evil exists amongst us. We’ve spent an entire lifetime watching crime drama and law procedurals on television. We watch as master criminals and intuitive investigators battle it out in 42 minutes (not counting the commercials).

We pride ourselves in figuring it out before the actors reciting a script. Occasionally even we are fooled and we chalk it up as another great show and another lesson learned. The clown is never the guilty party. The red herring is exactly that. It can’t be the red herring. That would be too easy.

Except someone has spent their entire life as the red herring. He struck again and told you just enough to land himself in hot water. He disqualified himself again. He openly admitted to crimes in his business and crimes against humanity. He couldn’t be guilty. We’re missing something. It can’t be that easy. It doesn’t follow the right story arc.

In many ways, Mitch McConnell represents the evil we readily relate to. He makes you work a little harder. You have to go back into the recesses of your memory to prove it. In this case, McConnell used the reflexive “blame Biden” approach. It was his fault we left Afghanistan. Except it really wasn’t. We all know that, but we have to work a little harder to get there.

Unfortunately, not all of us know it. Some have the memory of a gold fish. They just keep swimming. There is always a subset that never will remember these things. Trump made the deal that Biden executed. He even openly bragged at the time that Biden wasn’t going to be able to get out of the deal. Just keep swimming.

Maybe these things are just too easy to track. Maybe our minds are just too trained to follow the 42 minute story arc. Maybe we are just too used to working at finding evil that we just ignore it when it is standing in front of us. Maybe we are just trained not to trust the words of our leaders.

It is more likely that it is the story of the frog in a boiling pot. The idea is fairly simple. Throw a frog into a boiling pot and it immediately jumps out. Slowly turn up the heat and it will comfortably cook. While some debate the analogy, there is some thought that humans are no better than the common frog. It goes back to the theory of sunken costs. If I bail now then I somehow have to explain to everyone and myself that all of the stuff before was apparently okay.

So, either I am somewhat deplorable or I’m all in. I have a pair of fours in my hand, but I’ve already thrown twenty bucks into the pot, so what the hell? When you are all in you never have to admit the obvious. You can claim it was all fake news anyway. So, when the evil that tempts all mankind announces himself again you just keep whistling by the graveyard.

Yesterday I talked about how Trumpists flocked to their latest article of faith that Trump isn’t really impeached because the House hasn’t transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  There is no basis in law or fact for that belief, but it’s there anyway, virally spreading throughout Trumpland.  During our Trumpist infestation we experienced yesterday that was the recurring theme.  These trends often start as a joke or a hoax, sometimes on satire sites, but quickly morph into viral proliferation by those who desperately cling to anything that supports their predisposed beliefs.  Here’s the Google trend line for searches this week on “Trump not impeached”:

And, as you would imagine, the regions that have the most searches are the red states.  There’s new viral rumor now growing in Trumpland and that is, now that Trump is impeached, he’s automatically eligible to run 2 more times.  That is REALLY stupid, and is completely unsupported both in the Constitution including the 22nd Amendment.  It started as a “joke” in October, but really took off this week, spreading across right wing pages by Trumpists.  Here’s the Google trend line for “Trump can run for third time”:

This kind of proliferation is what makes brainwashing so nefarious.  Many of the Trumpists’ comments during our infestation yesterday were repeating absolute nonsense, Russian propaganda, boasting, taunting, and personal insults.  None of the dozens of comments we received were based in any kind of fact; all taunted; none were even reasonable.

With rampant propaganda proliferated over social media facts or truth no longer matter.  Worse, Trump’s Twitter account amplifies these lies.  Every time he tweets one of his insults, childish taunts, threats, or lies,  it goes out to millions or users, retweeted thousands of times.  In the hands of an immoral politician like Trump, social media is weaponized for the dark side.  You can see it, but can also measure it.  Here’s the search terms “Burisma” and “Hunter Biden”:

These trends follow Trump’s twitter feed and those who support him.  Nobody ever even heard of Burisma, and few were even aware of Hunter Biden until Trump, Giuliani, and the Noise Machine started repeating it.  And, they almost got away with it; were it not for the whistleblower, Ukraine would have announced an investigation of the fabricated Russian story that Ukraine was the bad actor in 2016, and Biden’s chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee would have been destroyed.

Integrity matters, but evil can easily run over integrity because brainwashing works really well.  And THAT threatens our republic more than any outside force.

Do you think Ted Cruz sounds like a delusional lunatic?  Do you, like me, sit slack jawed while listening to the nonsensical tirades of Screwy Louie Gohmert?  Well, I’ve got a piece that will help you understand how we got here.

This is actually from last year, but I re-read this piece from the Washington Monthly and thought it would be a good reminder of how ultra-conservative ideologues went crazy, destroying politics in the US as we knew it.  Most interesting? They did it by adopting tactics used by the Communists in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.  The result is that they have now vilified you, me, and everyone else with whom they disagree, using ever more desperate tactics as demographics and common decency move more and more against them.

Just hours after Trump caved to overwhelming pressure on his idiotic separation scheme, word started leaking out of the White House that, characteristically, after causing chaos with some cruel, pointless tactic, the Trump White House has no clue how to reunite over 2,400 kids with their over almost 5,000 parents.  Anyone with common sense can divine the reason because everything Trump does is half-assed, and intended to inflict the most damage, either by design or, more likely, by gross incompetence.  From slashing taxes, to efforts to destroy the ACA, to attempts to reverse education reforms, undo environmental policies, sell off protected lands, everything Trump touches – well I’ll quote Tony Soprano on this one – “I’m the reverse Midas; everything I touch turns to sh*t.”  That old quote is certainly apropos here.  Trump thoughtlessly ripped families apart, and to keep all those people out of sight, immediately shipped them off to seemingly random cities all over he country.  It’s easily conceivable that a family of 4 could have members in different Trump Big Box Prisons in four different states.

Trump thinks that him signing yet another executive order (which reverses his last executive order) will make all the furor go away without doing anything else.  It’s up to us to not let that happen.  There are almost 7,500 people scattered to the 4 winds with no plan to reunite them and to treat them humanely.  It’s time for us to keep the pressure on to fix this catastrophe that is completely of Trump’s own making.

There is a place for anger, and this is it.

Today, the US announced it is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Commission Trumping up (no pun intended) charges of bias against Israel and the US.  Democracy dies in darkness.  And it is closing in.