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| image generated via Google Gemni |
{Huffington Post 9 October} ‘Therapists Warn This Normalized Trump Behavior Is Causing Real-World Harm: People often look up to the president — and in this case, that’s clearly a problem.’“At the end of the day, at the core of it all, we are normalizing bullying,” Believe it or not, there are those of us in this rotting #Murica who saw through the orange charlatan from the moment he waddled into the political spotlight during the 2016 presidential election: all bluster and hollow pomp, a grotesque fusion of snake-oil salesman and a game-show host gone feral. Even then—and it was as plain as the noonday sun—many of us warned that his dark little genius was to offer his followers the most seductive narcotic of all: permission. Permission to be vile. To wallow in their worst instincts. To spit, to sneer, and to call it honesty, faith, and love of country. He told them, in essence, “Be monstrous—it’s patriotic.” And they bloody well believed him.
And so the poison spread. The result? A nation turned septic. It was plain to behold amid the pandemic: tantrums over mask mandates, anti-vax derangement, the whole ghastly carnival of ignorance dressed up as rebellion. Hundreds of thousands needlessly dead—martyrs not to liberty, but to pride: gross, swollen, and witless. They mistook selfishness for freedom, and obstinacy for courage.
And did anyone learn a damned thing from that grotesque morality play? Not a whit. We have stumbled straight into a moral sinkhole—truth now counteth for nought, cruelty is held a grace, and irony lies entombed beside empathy. The temper of the multitude hath soured to gall. Everyone is furious, yet few hearken, and the whole place feels like a sorry rehearsal for the end of civilisation.
One cannot build a functioning society upon spite and delusion. One cannot write a decent song—much less govern a free polity—when every voice screams in its own discordant key. All is but clamour now: harsh, unmelodious, and void of delight. The spirit of this age? A nation of amplifiers, each howling into the void, drunk upon the echo of its own folly. Verily, few tyrants in the annals of the world have so perfectly mirrored the collective nature of their countries in their appointed ages as hath Donald Trump. —Arthur Newhook, 9 October 2025.
“Psychiatrists have joined other public health groups in calling for the removal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.” {NPR 7 October}
The eighty-seven-year-old former publisher of the Soviet-era Pravda found dead after a so-called ‘nervous breakdown'. - One does begin to wonder—what is it with Russians and their perennial tendency to fall from windows? Granted, it is among the more miserable places on earth to dwell, yet the pattern remains curiously consistent, yeah? {The Times 6 October}
“Peter Thiel does not want to build a better world like he claims. He wants to build a world where he decides what ‘better’ means. No one else gets a vote.” {Jacobin 6 October}
{alternate text for the above image} A digitally rendered dystopian tableau depicting a young woman with silver-blonde hair standing solemnly in a deserted urban canyon. She wears a bright yellow dress that glows defiantly against the cold, blue-grey gloom of the city. In her hands she clutches an American flag—not as a banner of triumph, but as an emblem of anguish and endurance. Towering screens on all sides project the shouting face of Donald Trump, his mouth frozen mid-harangue, echoing the omnipresent propaganda of an authoritarian state. Around her swarm identical men in suits, their faces contorted in mockery, fingers jabbing accusingly toward her as they chant slogans of populist fervour. The cracked pavement beneath her feet and the discarded placards reading Make America Great Again evoke the moral ruin of a nation intoxicated by cruelty. Her stillness, luminous amid the jeering mob, becomes the lone act of grace in a society drowning in its own hostility.
Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook. FULL LIST OF LINKS - linktr.ee/arthurnewhook. DONATIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED on Cash App ($ANewhook).
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