Intelligencer writer Sam Adler-Bell admits that pointing out MAGA hypocrisy ‘is a chump’s game,’ as is looking for “consistency” or “integrity.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson recently took a question about a MAGA-minded Jan. 6 Trump parolee caught conspiring to kill a Democrat. He then tried to blame Democrats for the Trump supporter’s attempted violence by saying: “They call every Republican a fascist now.”

“For sanity’s sake, I will state the plain facts: A man pardoned by the sitting president after engaging in a riot on his behalf was apprehended a second time, for allegedly threatening to kill a leading Democrat — and this, according to the Speaker of the House, is the fault of leftists,” said Adler-Bell.

“Amid a syncopated cascade of assaults, partisans play a perverted game of hot potato: Whoever is holding the ball when the music stops is responsible,” Adler-Bell argued. “If the latest shooter is plausibly left wing, the right is faultless, and vice versa, until the next round begins. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but everybody plays. (And sometimes, of course, you cheat. In the Moynihan case, Johnson found himself holding the ball and threw it at his opponent’s chest.)

But that’s not the story, said Adler-Bell. The story is that the U.S. public remains fascinated with the idea of fixing things through violence, and our illness is going to burn the world.

“Today, American film and television are lousy with special-forces units, police detectives, and secret agents who use illegal and inhumane means (often including torture) to restore order and protect the innocent. Sometimes these bad but necessary men, like [John] Wayne in Liberty Valance, are consumed by guilt and drink — and, in a last feeble gesture of moral purgation, die alone in despair,” Adler-Bell said. “We Americans love these stories for their psychic parsimony: They redeem the violence underpinning the social order while allowing us to remain, at once, tut-tutting bystanders to its cruelty and deliciously complicit in its excess.”

Americans keep “looking for some new order born from the ashes of the old,” said Adler-Bell. For the right, Donald Trump is “the gunslinger who has come to slay the forces of liberal chaos and break a few rules, like habeas corpus and the First and Fourth Amendments, to establish a conservative empire.

Liberals, meanwhile. "await an avenging authority — a new kind of candidate, a sufficiently ballsy prosecutor, a judge or general — to come along and clean up the neighborhood,” said Adler-Bell. “The authoritarian chaos of the past decade demands a renewal of the liberal order in a more muscular form.”

We keep hoping that we can get “a new civilized order” from violence, but that’s simply not how you build anything.

Our “perennial American delusion,” said Adler-Bell, quoting writer Susan Sontag, is that purgative violence can be used to restore our blamelessness and our purity. It was okay to affectionately jeer at American barbarism, but that was before the American empire held the planet’s “historical future in its King Kong paws.”

“It is incredible that a country so idiotic and prone to neurotic excess has managed to keep the world in its meaty grasp for so long, fondling it like Lennie with his mouse, said Adler-Bell. “America has made the world pay for its priggish delusions of sanity. It will surely make the world pay for its nervous breakdown.”

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.

A prominent political analyst revealed the "unprecedented features" of President Donald Trump's strikes on alleged drug boats in international waters in a new essay published on Sunday.

Richard Galant, executive producer of Now It's History on Substack and a Senior Fellow at New America, argued in a new essay that Trump seems to be drawing from the authority other presidents have used during America's War on Drugs. He compared the strikes to operations conducted under the Hoover and Nixon administrations.

However, Galant noted in the essay that there are two "unprecedented features" of Trump's strikes.

"For one thing, the people on the boats being blasted out of the water by U.S. drones are being denied even a pretense of the due process U.S. law gives to suspected criminals," Galant wrote. "'Judge, jury and executioner,' would be an apt way of characterizing those in the military who have to pull the trigger."

"For another, there is no explanation of how the boats and those aboard are being chosen as targets," he continued.

He also noted that Trump appears to be fighting a war, even though he has not formally declared one.

"Declaring a war that is not really a war is irresistible for some presidents," Galant wrote. "It sounds dramatic, forceful and all-consuming even though in reality it isn’t anything like a real war. After all, a real war requires making unpopular decisions like mobilizing much of the economy and potentially drafting citizens into the military."

Read the entire essay by clicking here.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s neighbors sent him a "pointed message" by organizing a protest on his front lawn, according to a new report.

The Daily Beast reported on Sunday that Kennedy's neighbors placed a skeleton sitting in a chair on his lawn, holding a sign that says "I wish I took my vaccine!" There is also a small bottle of Tylenol at the skeleton's feet, alluding to Kennedy's comments about links between Tylenol usage during pregnancy and autism. They also put a headstone in his yard that reads "I did my own research," according to the report.

“We have people taking photos of it constantly,” Christine Payne, one of Kennedy's neighbors, told the outlet.

Payne added that she and other neighbors included specific imagery to comment on some of Kennedy's recent claims. Kennedy has had to walk back his claims that Tylenol usage causes autism.

Experts have also noted that Kennedy's stance on vaccines undermines President Donald Trump's achievements with Operation Warp Speed, the federal program that developed the first COVID-19 vaccine.

"My son has autism, and a neighbor is very active in anti-vaccine efforts," Payne said.

"There is a small bottle of Tylenol also next to his feet because we’re very concerned about it affecting children," she added.

Read the entire report by clicking here.