All posts tagged "sabrina haake"

How Harris and Walz are fighting Trump with joy and positivity — and winning

Evolutionary biologists know why humans spend disproportionate energy on negative thoughts compared to positive: Teasing out threats, real or perceived, is a basic tool of survival.

Around 3 a.m. isn’t the only time negative thoughts seize us. Even when we’re at ease, evolutionary instincts cause us to seek out whiffs of threat. Commonly called the human “negativity bias,” we train our mental energy on perceived danger, releasing cortisol and triggering flight or fight instincts that have served mammals from the beginning.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is a master of manipulating people with negativity and fear. He energized a naked tribalism movement on us vs. them vitriol, with immigration, crime, race and “vermin” of different political views topping his greatest hits. Vice presidential choice J.D. Vance’s negative divisiveness is next level: Hillbilly vs. Silicon Valley, parent vs. childless, cat ladies vs. those with a proper stake in democracy. Almost overnight, Vance served up new antagonisms between voter categories we didn’t even know existed.

Negativity sells. It also kills.

ALSO READ: 21 worthless knick-knacks Donald Trump will give you for your cash

Stewing in frustration over Vice President Kamala Harris’ meteoric rise, Trump can hardly restrain his jealousy. In a revolting pique of petty, confirming that Trump would destroy America for his own personal gain, Trump insulted American hostages’ release from Russia, praising Russian President Putin instead. He then drooled giddy when the stock market tanked last week, clucking, “TRUMP CASH vs. KAMALA CRASH!” then was silent when the market rebounded as if the “crash” had never happened.

Trump/Vance obviously understand that negativity sells, they recognize fear in particular as our most primal and powerful motivator. But too many years in the Trump hate machine, amplified by Fox News and similar propaganda is also making people sick. Not only do negative thoughts lead to aggression and war, but compulsive or repeated negativity makes people physically ill.

It’s fairly well known that Trump supporters are more likely to die of COVID-19 and gun-related homicides than the general population; less known is that negative thoughts create neural pathways in the brain that lead to illnesses too. Grievance politics in general may be killing its own adherents, as researchers have shown a gap in mortality rates between Republican and Democratic counties in nine out of 10 causes of death.

ALSO READ: Why ‘vanilla’ Tim Walz is the ingredient to beat Trump: Dem lawmakers

Even setting aside COVID deaths, American mortality rates differ by politics across the board, leading one researcher to conclude that “Political environment is a core determinant of health.” The Marquee Medical team explains that “people with high levels of negativity are more likely to suffer from degenerative brain diseases, cardiovascular problems, digestive issues, and [they] recover from sickness much slower than those with a positive mindset.”

It’s more than a theory. Neural pathways caused by nonstop exposure to Trump’s repetitive, negative thoughts can be detected physically, as most features of neural circuits can be visualized with magnetic resonance imaging.

Happy warriors Harris and Walz to the rescue

The outpouring of enthusiasm for Harris and America’s dad, Tim Walz, suggests voters have grown tired of political negativity. As veep, Harris faced relentless Republican criticism over her laugh, with GOP detractors panning her as unserious and intellectually weak. But now that she is in command, her intellect has become irrefutable, allowing her to embrace her laughter and smile often on the podium.

Anyone who missed Harris-Walz’ first rally together should treat themselves and watch it. It was a joyful, positive event. Even when Walz delivered his obligatory zingers about Trump and Vance, he did it with humor and without nastiness.

When he pointed out that crime was up under Trump, he added, laughing, “that's not even counting the crimes he committed!” On Trump’s abortion and culture wars, he delivered a plain spoken message: “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

Joy, common sense and positivity have emerged as Harris/Walz superpowers.

A tale of two tarmacs

Trump has evidently assigned Vance to troll Harris and Walz as they make their way through several swing states to introduce themselves to voters.

In an episode that can only be described as weird, by now a cliché, Vance showed up on the same tarmac after Harris had just landed in Air Force Two in Eau Claire, Wis.

He got out of his plane with an entourage, and en masse, they chased down reporters assembled for Harris so Vance could insult Harris and talk about AF2 becoming his plane. The group Vote Vets shared a video of the tarmac episode, observing, “This creepy weirdo is giving off serious stalker vibes.”

After the tarmac episode, Trump’s juvenile spokesman / pit bull Steven Cheung posted on X that they’d make sure Air Force Two is “deep cleaned because Lord only knows what Kamala Harris and her team have done on there. The smell alone on that plane must be crazy.”

I’m rolling in the vibe shift

The contrast between Trump/Vance hate and Harris/Walz joy seems to be resonating with voters.

Partly, it’s relief. Our political discourse has been poisoned with Trump’s hate-filled spittle for nearly a decade. We have watched Trump bully so many people that watching Harris/Walz laugh at him delivers a catharsis. Everyone likes to see a bully get his comeuppance, seeing him get laughed at is a special treat. When the laughter comes from his would-be victim — e.g., the one he tries hardest to dominate and bully — it’s delicious.

Walz first tapped the psychological power of calling Trump/Vance “weird” instead of dangerous. The terms aren’t mutually exclusive, but, Walz intuits, repeatedly warning about how Trump threatens our 250 year old democracy gives him too much power.

Walz advised, “Don’t lift these guys up like they’re some kind of heroes. Everybody in this room knows — I know it as a teacher — a bully has no self-confidence. A bully has no strength. They have nothing.”

Not only does worrying about Trump’s Hitler parallels strengthen him, but having Walz defang “socialist” as free lunches for poor students so they can learn and stay off the streets already just feels right. It feels like the homespun truth America has been waiting for.

Walz said, in his first rally with Harris,“Thank you, Madam Vice President, for the trust you put in me, but maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.” Optimism for America’s future, personal freedom, and yes, joy, are new welcome strangers in the public square.

Like most unhealthy habits in life, negative thoughts can become addictive, and can kill you. The good news is, this is an addiction that can be broken. It’s been said that it takes 21 days to truly break a habit. We have almost 90 days.

I, for one, am thrilled to join my country on our joyous, about-damn-time path to recovery.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

My Mother’s Day gift to my mom: honesty

My mom died from COVID-19 four years ago, just after Mother’s Day. I couldn’t write about it until I could be honest about who she was, a feat complicated by my then-pending congressional race, which I lost in spectacular fashion. Apparently, climate change isn’t at the top of voters’ concerns. Yet.

The worst part of my mom’s death was that she — like most COVID patients — died alone in a sterile hospital room with no family allowed to visit. Every time I tried to write this Mothers’ Day column, my simmering anger at how Trump mismanaged and lied to the country about the novel coronavirus percolated into a full boil that scalded my best intentions.

Instead of honoring my mother’s truth without deflection or self-pity, I kept churning out bitter screeds about how elections have consequences, and our democracy wouldn’t be on the brink if only — if only — everyone who cares actually bothered to vote.

My mother was extraordinary in many ways, including her oft-repeated 1960s disdain for a woman’s “fate” to be stuck in the house, raising children, while men got to “see the world.” The man whose ticket out of Southern Indiana she co-opted — my father’s — would buy her passage to the West Coast, where he served in the U.S. Navy in Oahu, Hawaii. It was also where he brutalized her, us, and anything that moved, repeatedly, with impunity, and without regard to audience.

Because of my father’s predilection for extreme violence, I became my mother’s caretaker from a very early age. After the final episode, complete with burst capillaries from her near-total asphyxiation, we went into foster care.

ALSO READ: How Fox News is lying about Trump’s trial

When my mom eventually got out of the hospital and rehab — what can be done, anyway, to “rehab” someone who was oxygen-deprived long enough for tiny red capillaries to burst all over their face? — we moved back to Southern Indiana.

My mother was so afraid my father would return from the Vietnam War and finish the job, she never sought child support, which meant years of dire poverty on top of whatever brain damage she sustained from the burst capillaries episode. Even in her compromised state, my mother knew that when a man promises to finish you off, he will keep his promise if given half the chance.

So we moved to Huntingburg, Indiana, to live with my mom’s equally poor sister, Aunt Maggie. My mom and her sister Margaret were apparent small-town lookers whose beauty and ambition attracted the same kind of husband — one who needs to capture, then own and cage, a beautiful thing. Aunt Maggie was making her way as a newly single mother as well, and for the same reason.

Shortly after we all moved in together, Aunt Maggie’s escape — and her life — ended abruptly. Her rough life and violent ending would upstage even that of my mother.

Maggie’s death was a continuation of an unending rotation, a locked cycle of poverty and trauma. It was the same story played out across the country in the nightly news, only the names have been changed. In case anyone is unschooled in the ways of poverty, poverty causes trauma causes poverty causes trauma. After some years stuck on this decidedly American treadmill with one tragedy following the next, my mom eventually remarried a wonderful man, my stepfather Bob Hyde, who would stop to help a struggling beetle.

While we were fortunate to have a kind benefactor in our lives, neither of my siblings overcame their early origins. You hear that formative childhood years — one through five — pretty much set the tone, and I guess that’s true enough in our case. I'm pretty sure the only reason I became "successful" (whatever that means, here I mean financially) while my siblings floundered, was because my mom tapped me to take care of her, which meant early financial responsibility and an unusual work ethic. I started earning money at 11 and never stopped. I financially supported my mom and sister all my adult life. My brother Curtis, meanwhile, started his own poverty-trauma treadmill, probably because it was what he knew, and today he runs on it still.

My mother's situation left her entirely dependent on me, and over the years, her dependence developed into raging neediness over all things, large and small. I’ll never know whether my mother’s mental health challenges were organic, or caused by extreme domestic violence. On the campaign trail, when I spoke about growing up with the effects of untreated substance abuse and domestic violence, I was talking about my father. When I spoke about growing up with untreated mental illness, I was talking about my mother. For sure, all three things in our household were interrelated, as they are in most every tragic, sad headline running in the evening news.

The only Mothers Day gift I can offer up now is full honesty and ownership of a story all too common in America. It’s a reality of extreme domestic violence, substance abuse and untreated mental illness. It’s the American struggle of single moms so afraid of their abusers they live in poverty instead of seeking child support. It’s an American story that plays across racial lines, geography and culture, one that state-forced births will only exacerbate, trapping more vulnerable women with their murderous abusers.

My tribute to my mother is a siren of agency and honesty, so kids and mothers in the same situation know they are not alone. Stigma, and societal judgment, only make tragedies worse, which is why we should spare no time for them. Instead, we should salute the women and children who survive.

I miss my mother. She was a stone around my neck, but she was my heavy necklace.

It took me a minute to write this because the real tragedy wasn’t in how the country failed her at her death. The real tragedy is how our laws and our system failed to protect her — and hundreds of thousands of women like her — in life.

So I guess my screed survives, after all. Stripped of angst, anger, regret and sorrow, it boils down to one simple word: vote.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

How Fox News is lying about Trump’s trial

David Pecker, long-time publisher of the National Enquirer and Donald Trump’s bosom buddy, spent hours on the witness stand in Manhattan last week.

With the relaxed demeanor of a jovial grandfather, Pecker described how he, candidate Trump and Michael Cohen met in 2015 to plot how they’d influence the outcome of the 2016 election. During that meeting, they conspired to hide news that could harm Trump and embellish fake stories that disparaged Trump’s rivals.

All was done, Pecker testified, with the express and stated intention of promoting Trump’s candidacy for U.S. president.

Pecker’s testimony revealed a conspiracy

Pecker’s testimony made clear that mainstream media’s insistence on calling the case a “hush money” trial is sloppy. The case is about Trump’s conspiracy to violate federal election laws. Paying hush money to a porn star is legal. Falsifying business records to hide illegal campaign contributions is not.

Trump, Pecker and Cohen paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to “kill” news that could hurt Trump’s campaign, without reporting those payments to the Federal Election Commission as the campaign contributions they were.

ALSO READ: 16 worthless things Trump will give you for your money

As part of the same conspiracy, Trump and Pecker also manufactured fake stories to damage Trump’s political rivals. Who can forget Trump’s claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved with the assassination of JFK? During an interview, Trump told Fox News, “(Cruz’s) father was with Lee Harvey Oswald” just before Oswald was shot.

It was a complete fabrication hatched by Pecker and Trump, and it made headlines — as intended.

Federal rules on this question aren’t complicated: Under federal campaign finance law, “anything of value given, loaned or advanced to influence a federal election” is considered a campaign contribution.

Money. Office equipment. The purchased silence of an adult film actress.

All such political contributions to federal candidates’ campaign committees are subject to the Federal Election Campaign Act’s source prohibitions; they are also legally subject to the Act’s amount limitations. Expenditures to purchase media coverage are reported campaign expenses. Expenditures to suppress media coverage are the same.

In an effort to track illegal contributions, influence and foreign interference, every campaign contribution is tightly monitored, and subject to the Act’s recordkeeping and reporting requirements. Individual contributions to politicians’ campaign committees are limited to several thousand dollars per person. Nowhere under federal election law can an individual or a candidate advance hundreds of thousands of dollars to directly aid a candidate’s campaign without reporting it.

Killing the Stormy Daniels story fit Trump’s pattern

The crux of Trump’s current case — the first of four separate felony trials he’s slated to face — is Trump’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to kill her story about their tryst in 2006, just after his wife gave birth to their son, Barron.

Trump similarly conspired to kill a story from Karen McDougal, a Playboy model Trump referred to as “our girl.” Pecker’s arrangement with McDougal went beyond a simple payment to bury her story about Trump. It also guaranteed McDougal the opportunity to publish her fitness columns with the National Enquirer’s parent company, and it included a guarantee of two magazine covers.

Pecker testified under oath that the agreement with McDougal was camouflage, intentionally disguised as a “contract for services” in an effort to circumvent federal campaign finance laws. Pecker said he feared at the time that what they were doing violated federal law. He said he told Cohen as much at the time, but Cohen was unfazed because, “Jeff Sessions is the attorney general and Donald Trump has him in his pocket.”

Fox News models Trump’s fake news in the National Enquirer

Anyone hoping Pecker’s explosive evidence will dampen the enthusiasm of Trump’s ~~cult~~ supporters will be sorely disappointed, because, thanks to Fox News, they will never know about it.

The big reveal here isn’t the criminality of a defeated ex-president. It isn’t that Trump had sex with a porn star. And it isn’t that Trump and Cohen, his “fixer” — what kind of presidential candidate has a “fixer,” anyway? — paid to kill stories in order to influence the election.

ALSO READ: ‘Fraudulent’: Trump tormentor Lincoln Project loses big money in cybertheft scheme

The big story is that, in a trial exposing how Trump used fake news to get elected in 2016, Fox News continues to peddle the same kind of genuinely fake news to its viewers that got it in such massive trouble after Trump’s defeat in 2020.

Despite paying nearly $800 million for admittedly lying to viewers about the 2020 election, Fox is up to the same tricks in 2024. Fox continues to falsely portray Trump’s trial, while embellishing stories like the “border invasion” to harm Trump’s political rivals.

During voir dire earlier this month, Jesse Watters, a Fox News commentator, announced on Fox: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury,” painting Trump as a victim of the “deep state.” There was, and remains, no evidence of liberal activists trying to get on the jury, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Biden has anything to do with the Manhattan district attorney’s charging decisions. Said district attorney is independently elected within New York City

Fox also claims that the court requiring Trump to attend his trial, as any criminal defendant is required to do, is “cruel and unusual punishment.” On the morning of the first day of Pecker’s testimony, instead of discussing what Pecker said, the network platformed Trump’s rants against the entire trial, as he fumed outside the courtroom, full throttle, for nearly three full minutes.

On the night of Pecker’s shocking testimony, which made headlines across nearly all mainstream outlets, Foxnews.com didn’t cover it in any meaningful way. The only trial-related news Fox ran called the trial an “historic mistake,” based on an editorial that was written prior to Pecker’s testimony.

With the headline, “Law professor roasts Manhattan DA's case against Trump in NY Times guest essay,” Fox buried all pertinent facts about Pecker’s testimony, substituting real news with fake news and spin just as Pecker, Cohen and Trump did in 2016.

Fox News should be held accountable

As the 2016 election and January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol proved, fake news is powerful. The resulting damage to our country, the election process, public discourse and democratic norms is incalculable.

This week, former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the U.S. House’s J6 select committee, described Fox News’ “line-up of flame-throwing commentators” who, every night, shout “alarms about the so-called communists and socialists — read: liberals — who supposedly threatened America’s very existence.”

Noting how Rush Limbaugh, then Tucker Carlson, and now Jesse Watters have all “served the same function — twisting facts and making their followers’ blood boil” in service to the party of Trump, Kinzinger concluded that, “these [GOP adjacent] media figures have done more to divide America than another single factor ...”

ALSO READ: A criminologist explains why Trump’s Manhattan trial is the biggest threat to his freedom

It is also widely suspected that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of” the GOP base, because Fox News constantly repeats Putin talking points in service to Trump.

Writing for the Washington Post, Robert Kagan wryly observed that, “A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see (other than Trump’s) well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power…?”

Kagan is not wrong, but he assumes the MAGA base has seen evidence of Trump’s well-documented criminality. They have not. Fox News-watching MAGA voters haven’t seen, heard or read about Trump’s crimes, because Fox News consistently lies about them, just as it is continuing to lie about Trump’s separate election interference case.

Fox has convinced roughly 40 percent of Americans that a dangerous demagogue is qualified to have the nuclear codes once again. Just as Hitler’s supporters eventually learned that his power was based on manufactured propaganda, Trump’s supporters will, gradually and eventually, learn the same. As long as their belief system remains unchallenged by their main source of information, Fox News, they can delay their own moment of reckoning.

Perhaps their reckoning will begin when Fox next appears in court to face the staggering damages they have caused through their destructive brand of fake news.

A massive, adverse court ruling kind of accountability that hurts — and one that can’t be hushed up — would be an excellent start.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

E. Jean Carroll didn’t win $83 million, Trump lost it

An old colleague and I exchanged a rolling text dialogue during the E. Jean Carroll jury trial last week.

We were riveted by Donald Trump’s performative alpha-hood. He angrily shook his head while Carroll was testifying. He furiously wrote and passed notes to his counsel. He tried to get the last word when the judge admonished him. He delivered nonstop under-his-breath insults obviously meant for jurors to hear, our favorites being “con job,” “witch hunt” and “ick.”

“Ick,” for those who didn’t follow the play by play, was what Trump blurted out when the judge described a sexual assault verdict delivered against him last year, in a different civil trial, by a different civil jury.

In May, a New York civil jury found that Trump pinned Carroll against the wall of a private dressing room at luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman, forced her pants down and forcefully penetrated her. That jury adjudicated Trump a rapist. During last week’s trial, as the judge relayed the facts underlying the previous verdict, Trump blurted, “ick.” He meant it as a slamming refutation, a show of disgust that he could ever have had sexual interest in an older woman — Carroll was 52 when Trump, in his late 40s, sexually assaulted her.)

ALSO READ: Sen. Josh Hawley is praying for your money

My texting buddy and I are both long-in-the-tooth trial lawyers who, try as we might, can’t quite quit the endorphin rush of giddy legal highs and crushing lows. Between us, we have almost 50 years’ experience in front of civil juries, enough experience to convert Trump’s performance into instant dollar signs. With every caustic quip Trump let rip in front of the seven men, two women jury, the dollar signs grew. When he noisily pushed back his chair and walked out in a huff while Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lead counsel, was delivering her closing argument, we texted each other, simultaneously: KA-CHING$.

When Trump sauntered back in, respectfully, and sat quietly composed for his own attorney’s closing, my friend texted, “Melania’s going to walk.” I had to hand it to my buddy for nailing it.

The plaintiff’s bar knows something about human psychology, and they understand shifting power dynamics. They know that juries are emotional creatures. Their decisions are often more informed by feelings than facts. They don’t like bullies. Mainly, they don’t like to see the judicial process insulted and degraded while they are sitting in a jury box with eight strangers, taking time away from their own families and careers, because they believe in the American legal system. Most trial attorneys know that when a defendant (or plaintiff) insults the judicial process by pretending to be above it, he is insulting the jurors who will decide his fate.

It doesn’t take a trial lawyer to intuit that Trump’s childish outbursts fell under the “don’t” column of Courtroom Antics 101. Trump’s conduct took me back to a case I tried in front of a jury in Chicago some years ago.

ALSO READ: GOP ex-lawmaker using old campaign cash to bankroll law school bearing his name

Our client lived on the fourth floor of a five-story Chicago walk-up. After living in the same apartment with the same stairs for several years, one day she fell down the stairs. It was a doozy of a fall; she fractured her ankle in a complicated break that required several surgeries to fuse.

The potential damages were steep but the liability side of the case screamed, “Run.” Every major law firm she approached before she landed at our tiny two person firm turned her down. The case wasn’t winnable, they said, because she took the same flight of stairs for several years, and never fell down them before. Since the stairs hadn’t changed, it would be nearly impossible to convince a jury that the construction defect (the risers were not uniform), and not her own carelessness, caused her to fall.

The case had “loser” written all over it; sensible firms with deep pockets politely said, “No.”

We were hungry. We said yes.

The trial lasted a week. We couldn’t afford fancy props. We certainly couldn’t afford to build a model of the staircase for an expert to demonstrate exactly why every building code in the country requires uniformity of treads and risers. Our “expert,” an equally hungry architect who rented space in our office building, ended up using the staircase model we could afford: an 8 1/2 X 11 piece of white paper, folded. He used it to demonstrate the structural components of a staircase: vertical risers that rise to support horizontal treads on which your foot steps, and what happens when those measurements are out of whack.

ALSO READ: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defends using campaign donations to pay family members

Opposing counsel sneered at our disadvantage. He mocked the paper model. At one point, he asked our expert to take off his shoe and hand it to him. He then intentionally crushed the paper with the shoe, just to hit home how out-maneuvered, underfunded and inferior we were. His clients, the developers, blurted out insults while our client was testifying. When our client cried on the stand because — using a wheelchair for months — she had put on over 40 pounds, defendants and their counsel found it funny.

The jabs and insults continued all week until the jury returned a whopper of a verdict in our client’s favor. The Cook County jury verdict reporter tagged it as a record, the highest verdict ever returned for the type of injury (bimalleolar fracture), in a city not exactly known for frugal juries.

I’d like to say we won that record verdict, but I’d be lying. The truth is that the defendants’ arrogance lost it.

Their blatant disrespect for us and our client (all women), as well as our poverty and our theory of liability, backfired.

E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers did a fine and credible job during last week’s trial. So did E. Jean.

But they didn’t win that $83.3 million verdict. Trump lost it.

His contempt for the rule of law was palpable, and the jury witnessed it firsthand. He demonstrated that he will not be bound by rules, proving E. Jean’s theory of the case. He insulted the process, one that jurors respected by virtue of showing up, every morning, to serve in a trial when they had other important places that they, too, needed to be.

No doubt Trump’s criminal defense teams will have a word with him on how to comport himself in his four upcoming criminal trials, which together comprise 91 felony counts. No doubt they will also fail to rein him in.

Small wonder Trump sees the judicial system as the one authority he can’t con. Small wonder he wants to destroy the rule of law rather than accept it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year federal trial attorney specializing in First and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

Few Trumpers who embrace political violence understand its endgame

The vast majority of people alive today don’t live in liberal democracies where fundamental human rights are respected, elections are real, and the rule of law, at least theoretically, applies to everyone.

Freedom House, in its annual Freedom in the World survey, estimates that only 20% of the world’s population lives in freedom, and even among free nations, democracy is still a baby. Out of 195 UN-recognized countries in the world, only eight — including the United States — have existed as electoral democracies for a century or more. This means that worldwide, most people have suffered under authoritarian rule, or lacked basic political or human rights, for part if not all of their lives.

ALSO READ: Why Biden doesn’t need to become Obama to defeat Trump

Many Americans have no concept of these realities and little understanding of our own remarkable history, in part because of the erosion of public education. As MAGA acolytes rush to crush democratic norms and blow up a system built to ensure liberty, they have no appreciation of the political precarity we’re in, or that once the rule of law is gone, illiberal brutality will fill its void.

And they’ll pay for it with their freedoms as much as any Democrat or liberal.

Ruthless governments are in the majority

Throughout most of the world, bloody conflict and brutal repression are the norm, not the exception. Military juntas, genocide and civil wars predominate in Myanmar, Mali, Sudan and many conflicted regions. Repressive and often barbaric religious fanatics reign in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa and in many other parts of the world. Some nations — Syria and Sudan, and Haiti and Venezuela closer to home — have entered the dark realm of failed states. Seventh-century brutality and medieval-era misery are baked into life in these countries, with their citizens harboring no real hope for escape.

ALSO READ: Selling hate, vulgarity and violence: How Trump and MAGA overran a quaint Midwest festival

In North Korea, Russia and China, nearly 1.7 billion people live under ruthless dictators no one is allowed to criticize. Kim Jong un uses prison camps, torture, forced labor and executions to terrorize citizens into submission. Vladimir Putin poisons his political rivals, blows up their planes or has them thrown out of windows. In China, ethnic and religious minorities are subject to torture, political indoctrination and state-forced sterilizations; many political activists live and die in labor camps.

All three of these dictatorships tightly control and prohibit free media and internet access. They forbid unscripted contact with the outside world to prevent citizens from seeing freedom, lest they compare.

It’s clear that human evolution, and human progress, have advanced unevenly throughout the world. Plotted on a map, current stages of social evolution would look like a rash with high variability, with plot points ranging from caveman-era brute force to socially advanced, peaceful cultures, and everything in between.

American chaos agents have a freedom death wish

Anyone who has access to the internet or TV can find real-time evidence of what life is like under totalitarianism. Anyone who is not intellectually challenged can see that life in America, even among the poor, is vastly more privileged, comfortable and free than almost anywhere else in the world.

But instead of taking sober stock of how the world really is, and what happens when the rule of law falls and a reign of terror takes its place, a significant percentage of Americans are now embracing a Donald Trump-stamped brand of political vengeance and violence with no clue whatsoever of what they are unleashing.

ALSO READ: A handy guide for translating Republican-speak into plain English

The naivete is remarkable, and dangerous, and reflects a nearly complete ignorance of both American history and human nature.

It’s almost as if they’ve been listening to a malign charlatan who has hoodwinked them into believing their relatively well-fed, clothed and secure lives are so terrible, and their grievances so severe, that they have no alternative but to subvert the rule of law, dismantle an imperfect but functional government and assume that the charlatan will grant them a better seat at his non-existent table of plenty (despite all evidence to the contrary).

Trump really could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone

On January 11, Trump defied the judge presiding over his business fraud trial and delivered a rant the judge had prohibited — flaunting, on national media, his abject disdain for the rule of law.

Two days before, Trump’s attorneys argued that a president cannot be prosecuted unless that president is first impeached by the House and convicted in the Senate.

Using that logic: If a president sells our nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, and makes enough cash in the bargain, he can simply resign from office to escape impeachment and move back into private life, much enriched.

The legal absurdity of Trump’s position was laid bare when Judge Florence Pan asked whether a president could deploy SEAL Team 6 to murder a political rival and get away with it if the Senate failed to convict, for whatever reason (such as being scared of what an assassinating president would do to them.)

Trump counsel’s contorted answer boiled down to a ridiculous yes, yes indeed: If Congress fails to impeach, a president can murder his political rivals and get away with it.

A week later, the collective eyebrows of the nation’s criminal trial bar remain hyperextended, stuck somewhere between mid-forehead and natural hairline.

When Trump glorifies violence, his useful idiots listen

Trump’s embrace of political violence is not new. During the first months of his campaign, in 2016, Trump encouraged his fans to attack protestors they didn’t like, and to “knock the crap” out of them. At least one MAGA man took him up on the suggestion.

Undeterred, Trump has continued to extol the virtues of violence ever since.

He has suggested shoplifters should be shot and has called for the death penalty for drug dealers, petty or otherwise. He encouraged New York police to rough up people they were arresting, telling the police not to be “too nice.” He called for George Floyd protesters to be shot, and he threatened to deploy the U.S. military to quell Black Lives Matter protests across the country. He said that his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a military general he appointed, should be executed for treason. On Jan. 6, 2021, after he convinced a frothing mob their votes had been “stolen,” they stormed the U.S. Capitol, carrying a noose and chanting for the death of Vice President Mike Pence.

Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

A defeated president trying to subvert the Constitution through force to stop the peaceful transfer of power is the closest our government has ever come to being overthrown, not counting an attempt to secede that sparked the Civil War. It is no comfort that, throughout history, malign actors who attempt a coup rarely attempt only one.

The hoodwinkery of it all

To attend this month’s appellate argument on his claim of criminal immunity, Trump had himself driven by motorcade (presidential style).

After his attorneys flailed under questioning, Trump festooned himself with American flags and state insignia, and held a press conference (presidential style).

After previously referring to the “poisoning of American blood,” and calling Democrats and political opponents “vermin,” at his press conference he threatened the nation with “bedlam” if he loses (Hitler style).

Despite his unending fascistic rhetoric, Trump remains paradoxically prickly about Adolf Hitler comparisons. His spokes-bull Steven Cheung recently warned that people who make such comparisons will have their "existence crushed" in a second Trump term, apparently missing the irony.

ALSO READ: Capitol offense: King of GOP Never Trumpers just hurt a lot of big Republican feelings

If Trump has stayed true to one principle, it’s this: Only Donald Trump matters. His supporters, the political violence he encourages in them, and the destruction of institutions such as the rule of law are no more than means to an end. His end, he has made clear, is unchecked power. The same can be said of Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Kim and nearly every dictator, past or present.

Meanwhile, the grift continues. A recent Trump fundraising email told supporters, “America has descended into utter tyranny” because “right before our very eyes, our once beautiful Republic is being transformed into a Marxist tin-pot dictatorship where Crooked Joe’s regime has weaponized the legal system against not only a former president (your favorite, I might add), but against the very citizens he swore an oath to protect.”

It's pretty obvious that Trump supporters have no concept whatsoever of what a tin-pot dictatorship really is, or they wouldn’t be rushing toward it, arms outstretched.

Other people, including those who have lived under oppressive rule, understand that freedom is the global exception, not the rule, and they are aghast to see the world’s gold standard of liberty winking at dictatorship.

The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has observed that the main goal of Trump’s rallies is “not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”

As a teacher in Australia recently posted on my substack,“From the outside, the USA presents as bats—t crazy.”

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

Why Gaza cannot become a binary choice

Hand-painted protest signs declaring “Israel can’t bomb its way to peace,” serve up palliative if elliptic logic for a Gaza cease fire. Continued violence guarantees violence will continue, a heart-wrenching Israeli/Palestinian pas de deux stuck on replay since 1948.

And yet, calling for an Israeli ceasefire is like telling someone to drop his gun while the psychopath who just murdered his family is still in the house. Hamas terrorists, likely armed by Iran and Russia, are committed to Israel’s complete annihilation, and they have the house surrounded.

America’s left, admirably quick to reject false binary choices in other settings, needs to reject the oppressor versus oppressed paradigm in Gaza. Two, three and 30 things can be true at the same time.

Allies urged Israel to engage in a proportional response

For religious zealotry, economic inequality and other key ingredients of radicalization, no other region in the world compares to the Middle East. Under Hamas rule, life in Gaza, one of the poorest places on earth, was described as “hell” long before Hamas’ sadistic attack on Israel.

As the world watches the humanitarian disaster unfolding — death from thirst and disease threatens to kill untold innocents — Israel’s allies expect the Jewish state to limit the deaths of innocent civilians to the extent possible, even while supporting its right to self-protection. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said early in the conflict hat the way Israel defends itself matters. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen echoed Blinken, saying, “Europe stands with Israel…(but) how Israel responds will show that it is a democracy.”

The Biden administration, becoming more critical of Israel’s strategy as Gaza’s death toll rises, has urged Israel to be “surgical” while seeking a humanitarian pausein the shelling — requests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so far, appears to reject.

Support for Israel, coupled with support for innocent Palestinians, reflects the International Humanitarian Law of proportional response.

In 1949, the fourth Geneva convention was adopted in response to Adolf Hitler’s atrocities against civilians, reflecting signatories’ agreement to limit harm to non-combatants in time of war. The Charter of the United Nations and its collective security mechanisms similarly approve “proportional” and necessary responses, while also seeking to limit harm to civilian populations.

Hamas has manipulated proportional response expectations

Weighing the proportionality of Israel’s response is inordinately complex, requiring nuanced considerations that defy simple placard narratives.

What violence could Israel — or any nation — dream up that would be “disproportional” to decapitated children? Does proportional justice allow an eye for an eye – and worse, as we are seeing in Gaza — if that is the only way to dismantle terrorists’ infrastructure?

Does the calculus of proportionality change if leaders of both sides, over decades, have intentionally negotiated/failed to negotiate a solution in such a way that left dispossessed Palestinians hopeless and desperate? And what tribunal of public opinion is informed and objective enough to assess, weigh and assign numeric value to the sincerity of each side’s peace attempts over the past 75 years?

ALSO READ: Selling hate, vulgarity and violence: How Trump and MAGA overran a quaint Midwest festival

Putting a pin in the long history of this saga, Israel’s self-defense today requires it to identify and track Hamas operatives, locate and destroy Hamas’ hidden supplies of weapons — including rockets and missile-launching hardware — and permanently destroy Hamas’ underground tunnels and communications networks, all while an anxious world watches it for any strategic overreach.

Hamas preemptively amplified the outcry of “disproportional response” by deliberately housing terrorists with innocent Gazan families and disbursing terrorist cells throughout hospitals, schools, mosques and apartment buildings. Hamas terrorists installed combatants among civilian populations throughout Gaza precisely because they knew the world would watch and condemn civilian deaths. Nihilistic and cynical, yes, but also an accurate calculation.

As images of desperate Gazans proliferate, how relevant is it that Hamas deliberately used their bodies as shields? To thirsty parents carrying thirsty children 12 miles south to sleep in tents in southern Gaza, where the fear of being bombed into oblivion still remains ever-present, does it really matter who threw the first punch?

Palestinian civilians are not Hamas

The left loses credibility by equating Hamas with Palestinians. Although the right also conflates Hamas with Palestinians’ ethnicity, they do it to punish all Palestinians, to advance the same race/crime narrative they promote in the U.S. The left should know better. It is just as racist, ignorant and dangerous for the left to defend Hamas terror on the basis of ethnic grievance as it is for the right to blame an entire ethnicity- Palestinians- for the crimes of a few.

Whether from the left or right, attempts to equate Palestinians with Hamas reveal historical ignorance. Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, by taking its political rival Fatah’s headquarters by bloody force, and has since maintained a stranglehold of power over the Gazan people. The citizens have not had an election since.

Celebrating Hamas’ terror attacks against Israel as political “resistance” is a short-sighted game that can only be played when the violence is “over there,” not in your own house. Does anyone justifying Hamas’ violence in Israel support the rise of political violence on the U.S. right?

ALSO READ: Why aren't corrupt lawmakers denied their pensions? Here's who to blame.

Logistics and history add even more complexity. Gaza is a densely packed and stacked concrete jungle cramming 2.3 million Palestinians into an area only five miles wide and 25 miles long; blockades from Israel and Egypt have added to the misery.

Long before Hamas’ most recent attack, electricity and running water were sporadic, and public education relied on double-shifts because there were so few schools under Hamas rule.

Israel, meanwhile, is a conundrum of complexity. Hamas slaughtered hundreds of innocent Israelis even as they were striving to help the Palestinians. Israeli humanitarian organizations working for Palestinian rights abound, including the Rabbis for Human Rights, the Coalition of Women for Peace, the Ir Shalem co-existence program and countless similar organizations. These progressive allies — including young people at a concert for peace — were brutally slaughtered, proving that Hamas’ bloodlust eclipsed any interest in improving Palestinians’ lives long ago.

A soldier’s sad lament

As many Israeli Defense Forces soldiers have made clear, they are fighting to defend their loved ones in Israel but they do not see oppressed Palestinian civilians as the enemy.

Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces called from Texas to return to fight in Gaza, wrote a compelling essay about his sorrow and frustration:

For 56 years Israel has been subjecting Palestinians to oppressive military rule. ... A Messianic religious minority has dragged us into a muddy swamp, and we

are following them …

Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy.

Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. On both sides, the intractable positions of a small group have dragged us into violence. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel or more ruthless.

The ideologies of both have fueled this conflict, leading to the deaths of too many innocent civilians…

May their memories be a blessing

Aside from reducing the risk of future terrorist attacks, eradicating Hamas could provide an opening for a legitimate Palestinian government that, for once, invests its resources in the neglected lives of Palestinians instead of weapons of death and mass destruction.

But the deaths in Gaza will be meaningless, and guarantee bloodshed for years if not decades to come, if Palestinians can’t see a just and peaceful path toward self-governance after the bombing ends. If the U.S. is a true friend to Israel, and a true adherent to international law, it must make that point crystal clear.

Innocent Palestinians deserve our compassion and an understanding of the geopolitical complexities that govern them. So do innocent Israelis.

After an unthinkable number of lives have been shattered, may the memories of the dead on both sides be a blessing — and a catalyst — for lasting peace.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.