A Saturday Reid: The monsters are among us

Evil here ... evil there ... diabolical evil everywhere

These stories out of Gaza are so monstrous, it’s hard to even know where to begin. The dehumanization of Palestinians is so deep, accountants are picking up assault rifles, putting on their uniforms, and burying children alive. Take eight minutes to watch this clip from the Katie Halper Show (watch til the end, to hear Dr. Perlmutter’s experience as a Jewish doctor, volunteering in Gaza.)

Also do check out my interview on The Joy Reid Show with Chris Hedges, on the horrors he’s seen and reported on in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Monsters of the Middle East are morally matched with the monsters here at home — chief among them, Donald Trump, whose regime might be the most patently corrupt, vicious, and downright evil in our lifetimes. These people make Nixon look like a saint. You’ve got to back to Woodrow Wilson to equal the racism; and perhaps to Andrew Johnson to match the venality.

After placing Los Angeles and now the District of Columbia effectively under military occupation (to get Americans to stop thinking about the Epstein files, Trump’s next stunt was to bring a fellow monster to America this week: offering Vladimir Putin his first visit to the U.S. since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine:

For most of his quarter-century rule, President Vladimir Putin visited Paris, London, Vienna and New York. Since Moscow invaded Ukraine, however, his destinations have been places like Minsk, Pyongyang, Hanoi and Beijing, as the West sought to turn Russia into a pariah.

Russia has countered Western attempts to isolate it by bolstering its ties with ex-Soviet allies and other developing countries. Putin’s travel also has been limited by an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued in 2023 that has prompted him to avoid visits to places that recognize the court’s authority. The U.S. isn’t a member of the court and thus doesn’t have an obligation to arrest him.

And Trump aimed to please: offering his Kremlin pal the red carpet treatment…

The goal of this “summit???” … to snag Trump a Nobel Peace Prize, of course, by ending the Putin-Ukraine war (something he originally promised his idiot base that he’d do on day one of his new presidency.") For years, Trump has been bitching, complaining and literally begging the Norwegians to give him the prize. Up to a month ago he was low-key threatening to TACO tariff them if they didn’t come through.

In lieu of actually promoting peace, Donald Trump has reportedly resorted to begging for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

The U.S. president phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” last month, hoping to discuss the possibility of acquiring the prestigious prize, as well as the state of tariffs, Norwegian business daily Dagens Næringsliv reported Thursday.

The newspaper cited unnamed sources regarding the previously unknown conversation, but Stoltenberg confirmed to Reuters that he had discussed tariffs and economic cooperation with Trump ahead of a separate call between the U.S. president and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Støre.

Pathetic indeed. Remember what the maga right reinterprets DEI to mean? “Didn’t Earn It?” Yeah, every accusation with these people is a confession. No one in Trump’s circle, cabinet or orbit has earned a thing they have. They just keep getting political and financial freebies because they are the “right” race and class; while people of color and women have to be ten times as good, smart and capable to get half the benefits, financial, career or political. And Trump keeps trying to make the Nobel Peace Prize one of those demographic freebies.

He’s even had the likes of war criminal Bibi Netanyahu nominate him (as if Bibi the Butcher has influence over a prize for peace) along with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Armenia, while ostentatiously claiming credit for ending the war between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda (a dubious peace indeed) and creepily flattering a Congolese journalist who embarrassed herself and the entire African continent by sucking up to him.

All of this as he desperately angles for the honor that President Obama received in his first year in office — sending Trump’s Satan-auctioned soul deeper into Hell.'

So what was the goal of Trump’s Alaska Putin summit? Appeasement. Per the Rupert Murdoch owned Telegraph:

Donald Trump says that within two minutes of meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, he will know “exactly whether or not a deal can get done” to end the war in Ukraine.

For the Ukrainians and Europeans, there is more than just a whiff of Munich about this summit, with neither party receiving an invitation for the crunch talks.

In 1938, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain agreed to carve up Czechoslovakia without representation from the Czech government.

The concern is that this could happen once again with Mr Trump and his Maga acolytes busy discussing “land swaps” and criticising Volodymyr Zelensky for arguing that his constitution bars him from doing so.

On the other end of the negotiation is Putin, an autocrat who believes Ukraine is a work of fiction and a mortal threat to his country.

Needless to say, the gambit failed. More from The Telegraph (which seems to oddly delight in skewering The Donald:

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal” and “we didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.” Speaking at his press conference with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump was probably trying to convey optimism about the trajectory of the negotiations to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.

Instead, his words encapsulated the shallowness of the first US-Russia presidential summit in four years.

The Alaska summit was a highly predictable failure. During the immediate build-up to the talks, Russian forces seized 10km of territory around Pokrovsk. Ukraine responded by firing drones on Russian oil giant Rosneft’s Syzran refinery in Samara. Russian state media outlets accused Ukraine of instigating provocations to derail the talks. Yuriy Shchygol, a Ukrainian Brigadier General, vowed to continue drone strikes until Russia ended the war.

As Russia retains offensive momentum, Putin had no incentive to end the war. The Alaska summit was instead a chance for him to showcase Russia’s great power status to his core supporters and partners outside the West, and to buy himself time. It sure lived up to its billing.

Failure is Trump’s lifelong M.O., so this one should have been expected.

All of the monsters are here

The U.S. has been fully taken over, at this point, by a band of Yarvinist technofeudalists who couldn’t get dates in high school and now hate democracy, women, and nonwhite people; and who long for a right wing monarchy in the style of the Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead (where women have to listen to them) while pining for the antebellum era (or at minimum, Jim Crow.)

And they’re led not just by Elon (whose SpeceX is a pure taker, giving us nothing in return) and the other tech bro billionaires, who are each venal in their own way, and the carceral companies, who are benefitting from the one industry Trump is delivering to the U.S. — mass Latino and Black detention, El Salvador-style — but by the tech billionaire boss of them all: Peter Thiel, who might be the most sinister, least known monster of them all — and who effectively is running our new surveillance state.

Many-times-married, cheater and alleged sex pest Pete Hegseth’s tell — besides openly attempting to turn the U.S.military into a right wing Christian man-cult and provoking misery amongst the troops (who also are being told their new mission is to invade Black-run U.S. cities) — was his retweet of a disturbing segment by his pastor, who doesn’t even hide his goal of dragging us back to before the 20th century:

The repost garnered a fresh rhetorical beat-down of Hegseth by Tammy Duckworth and other Democratic Senators and members of congress who have served, and silence from Joni Ernst, the woman who qualifications-wise, would have been a far more credible Republican choice for Hegseth’s job as Defense Secretary chief, had she had the courage or decency to meet with Hegseth’s sexual assault accusers (she is a sexual assault survivor herself, and Hegseth has said he’s settled with his accusers for an undisclosed amount of money) before bowing and scraping for Trump, and setting aside her doubts to vote his nomination through.

Oh, and Joni is also a monster.

We are thick with monsters in America right now … including the creepiest of them all, a man who by all rights should be dragged to the Hague for plotting ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, but who apparently has always been beastly:

to Kristi Noem, the puppy slaughtering, failed former governor who relishes the on-camera harassment of brown people and has been rightly mocked by South Park as a result.

To Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, who went from Obama appointee to literal ghoul and who by all rights should not be able to receive Catholic communion without an exorcism…

To Marco Rubio, who brings shame upon his own family every time he opens his mouth:

To RFK Jr., who while letting measles run wild, is mainly concerning himself with the fact that his actress wife won’t move to DC to live in the $16 million mansion he bought with his supplements fortune so they can be the new “it” couple in occupied DC… which they could only be, if the Millers don’t last…

To Pam Bondi, who remarkably stood between a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser, hush money felon and fake university scammer and defrauder of the state of New York and an accused sexual assaulter and declared that crime in DC will now come to an end:

Too bad Law and Order Pam couldn’t make that same declaration in Florida when Florida resident Jeffrey Epstein was still alive and offending. Or that she didn’t stand in the way of that sweetheart deal for vile child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to get sent to a minimum secrity Club Fed, in exchange for whatever it is Trump’s ex-lawyer Todd Blanche wants her to do to help Trump bury his connection to his sexual predator friend of more than a decade.

To Donald Trump himself … who may have had more to chat with Vladimir about in Alaska than just trading away our rare earth minerals and shaking his bum for a Nobel:

There are monsters among us. And they call themselves “MAGA.”

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