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Adam Lynch
November 02, 2025
ALTERNET
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.
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.
Why America can’t seem to 'cut out the Epstein cancer' like the UK
U.S. President Donald Trump and First lady Melania Trump depart for travel to Texas to tour areas affected by deadly flash flooding, from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
November 02, 2025
ALTERNET
Columnist Rosa Prince tells Bloomberg that she is startled by the degree of difference between the way Britain and the U.S. are treating the wealthy associates of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York will henceforth be addressed as plain old Mr. Mountbatten Windsor,” said Prince. “It's a stunning fall. The second, apparently favorite, son of Queen Elizabeth II has not only lost his many titles but also his home. He's been kicked out of his lavish grace-and-favor mansion in the grounds of Windsor Castle after elder brother King Charles III's patience finally snapped. An endless torrent of ugly revelations related to his closeness to pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein became unbearable for a family whose No. 1 job is to embody a dignified permanence at the heart of the British state.”
This reaction is a “ruthlessness and moral clarity others should try,” said Prince, adding that “The U.S. Congress and Trump administration need to do now what many of the president's supporters want and open the full Epstein files to public scrutiny.”
The reasons are obvious, and they are only lightly touched in a book by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, which Prince describes as a “Who's Who of rich, powerful men, and some women, whom she encountered during the horrendous two years she traveled the world with the disgraced financier.”
“They allegedly include dozens of politicians, business leaders and academics, whose friendship [Epstein] cultivated in the vain hope it would make him look weighty and clever. Among them is an individual she refers to as the ex-minister, whom [Giuffre] claims was the most violent of her rapists,” Prince said.
Yet, for the past year, Prince said Congress and the White House have obfuscated, “using political tricks such as early recess and the government shutdown to prevent disclosing the hundreds of gigabytes of data plus other material held by the FBI relating to Epstein and associates, including his jailed girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.”
“Why has the British establishment, not known historically for its alacrity, acted more swiftly than its U.S. counterpart to try to cut out the Epstein cancer,” said Prince. “UK tabloids are ferocious diggers, but public disgust at the affair and hunger for justice is no less potent in America. Quite the opposite.”
“The legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government should take their cue from the UK's non-executive chairman, King Charles. This scandal won't go away until the rot has been removed.
Columnist Rosa Prince tells Bloomberg that she is startled by the degree of difference between the way Britain and the U.S. are treating the wealthy associates of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York will henceforth be addressed as plain old Mr. Mountbatten Windsor,” said Prince. “It's a stunning fall. The second, apparently favorite, son of Queen Elizabeth II has not only lost his many titles but also his home. He's been kicked out of his lavish grace-and-favor mansion in the grounds of Windsor Castle after elder brother King Charles III's patience finally snapped. An endless torrent of ugly revelations related to his closeness to pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein became unbearable for a family whose No. 1 job is to embody a dignified permanence at the heart of the British state.”
This reaction is a “ruthlessness and moral clarity others should try,” said Prince, adding that “The U.S. Congress and Trump administration need to do now what many of the president's supporters want and open the full Epstein files to public scrutiny.”
The reasons are obvious, and they are only lightly touched in a book by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, which Prince describes as a “Who's Who of rich, powerful men, and some women, whom she encountered during the horrendous two years she traveled the world with the disgraced financier.”
“They allegedly include dozens of politicians, business leaders and academics, whose friendship [Epstein] cultivated in the vain hope it would make him look weighty and clever. Among them is an individual she refers to as the ex-minister, whom [Giuffre] claims was the most violent of her rapists,” Prince said.
Yet, for the past year, Prince said Congress and the White House have obfuscated, “using political tricks such as early recess and the government shutdown to prevent disclosing the hundreds of gigabytes of data plus other material held by the FBI relating to Epstein and associates, including his jailed girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.”
“Why has the British establishment, not known historically for its alacrity, acted more swiftly than its U.S. counterpart to try to cut out the Epstein cancer,” said Prince. “UK tabloids are ferocious diggers, but public disgust at the affair and hunger for justice is no less potent in America. Quite the opposite.”
“The legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government should take their cue from the UK's non-executive chairman, King Charles. This scandal won't go away until the rot has been removed.
See the Bloomberg report at this Kansas City Star link.
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