Sadists ® U.S: Trump and The Dark Tetrad, By Hal M. Brown (It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.)

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Some perfectly normal people have sadistic fantasies about what they’d like to do or see happen to certain people. They may think about these things, they may write about them, they may talk about them to friends. In this poltical climate they may involve someone named Donald Trump. They may be realistic fantasies involving torture or may take a Dantesque turn and be about a special level of Hell designed by the quintessential sadist Satan for just that person and his cohorts.

It takes a uniquely psychopathological personality to share these fantasies with the world. It takes someone who fits into The Dark Tedrad. More about that later.

This is the RawStory article that led me to write today’s Substact:

Trump floats sending 'thug' Tesla vandals to infamous El Salvador prison

This is the Trump Truth Social post put online at 4:30 AM today.

The RawStory article cites this story in Foreign Policy Magazine.

Here’s an excerpt:

Former prisoners have told Cristosal, the human rights organization that I work for, that they were greeted at prison gates by guards who beat them and warned that they would not leave the prison walking.

Despite the Bukele administration’s well-documented human rights abuses, the president’s offer to the United States has the backing of a viral marketing campaign. The government brags about its harsh treatment of prisoners and high incarceration rates online. It has produced high-resolution photos and videos of detainees and prisons that are distributed to the media and used in news reports around the world.

At the center of Bukele’s propaganda is El Salvador’s now infamous megaprison, the Terrorist Confinement Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT), which opened in 2023 and can house up to 40,000 inmates. It is still operating at half its capacity. Government handout images and content from choreographed press visits to CECOT have appeared below many headlines about El Salvador’s state of exception in the international press. Prisoners have shaved heads, tattooed faces, and wear all-white outfits—including white Crocs.

Foreign journalists reporting on the state of exception who fixate on CECOT are likely focusing on the wrong prisoners in the wrong prison. The middle-aged faces and full-body tattoos that appear in the footage from the megaprison suggest that they are gang members who have likely been in prison since well before the state of exception began. (Most Salvadoran gangs abandoned the practice of tattooing their faces years ago.)

Here’s more:

If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons.

Cristosal and other human rights organizations have documented credible evidence of sexual assault and rape against women and children detained under the state of exception. The combination of harsh conditions and systematic physical torture has caused the deaths of at least 367 people, according to documentary, photographic, and forensic evidence gathered by Cristosal’s investigators. Salvadoran authorities deny that torture and killings occur in the country’s prisons.

I rather doubt Foreign Policy Magazine is on Trump’s morning reading list.

Back to sadism. 

If you are up on your Trump psychopatholgy you not only know what malignant narcissism is, but also know what the Dark Triad is. There have been many articles about Trump and the Dark Triad (here). I’ve written several including, most recently, this one:

Because many people who have traits of The Dark Triad also are sadistic another pesonalality type called The Dark Tetrad was added by experts. You may not know what the Dark Tetrad is.

It is worth knowing what the Dark Tetrad is. Here’s a definition from a Psyhology Today article:

The Dark Tetrad, also known as the Dark Quad, is a set of interrelated negative personality features: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism. The term is an expansion of the idea of the Dark Triad construct, which does not include sadism. In the last decade, researchers have noted a correlation of sadism with Dark Triad traits, with the result of the Dark Tetrad.

People with Dark Tetrad traits score high on measures of the following:

• Narcissism: A belief that one is special, particularly gifted, obsessed with themselves and that they are superior to others.

• Machiavellianism: A tendency to see people as a means to achieve one's own goals.

• Psychopathy: A condition characterized by a lack of affective empathy and the willingness to exploit others.

• Sadism: The tendency to derive pleasure from the pain or humiliation of others.

It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad. If you want to explore this further, here’s an article by Morgan Sinclair, PhD: Heart of Darkness. Trump isn't just Dark Triad. He's Dark *Tetrad*.

Read my previous Substacks here. Warning: They are dark.

On top of all the other shit blowing into our faces we are dealing with finding out it's hit the Wikipedia fan too, By Hal M, Brown

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A report from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, accuses Wikipedia of anti-Isreal and anti-Jewish bias. It is titled “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality” You can read it here.

The image the ADL used for their report’s illustration, above, is an AI created version of the Wikipedia logo blowing apart. I added Wiki’s real logo on the lower left.

This was discussed on ‘Morning Joe’ today. They interviewed the president of the ADL, Joseph Greenblatt. This was the first I’d heard about it. 

This was covered in the media (see Google News search here) but as you can see it wasn’t getting major attention from very many American publications. I am pleased that “Morning Joe” covered it.

This is the Executive Sumarry from the report:

ADL has identified extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages. These issues include 1) a coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia content related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and similar issues, in which a group of editors systematically evade Wikipedia’s rules to shift balanced narratives toward skewed ones, spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism; and 2) pro-Hamas perspectives informing Arabic-language Wikipedia content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ADL has found clear evidence that a group of at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in concert to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.

These 30 editors were much more active than other comparable groups of editors, on average, by a factor of at least two, based on total edits made over the past 10 years.

• The 30 editors were much more likely than other editors to communicate with each other on Wikipedia: they were as much as 18x more active in group communications than comparable groups of editors.

• The editors appeared to coordinate to change pages related to Israel, Palestine¹, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.

• These edits have ramped up since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and include the systematic removal of citations to reputable sources and tandem voting to keep content critical of Israel but remove coverage of Palestinian violence and terrorism.

In addition to this multiyear campaign by bad-faith editors to revise Wikipedia’s content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ADL found evidence of biased and extremist content in Arabic-language Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s rules are not applied consistently outside of some English-language pages, allowing biased pro-Hamas content in the Arabic-language edition.

Pages related to Hamas in Arabic glorify the Palestinian terrorist organization and perpetuate pro-Hamas propaganda, while failing to follow Wikipedia’s rules for neutrality.

This report makes clear that Wikipedia needs to do far more to address anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias and coordination. Until it has done that, those who rely on Wikipedia – from Google Search to large language models like ChatGPT – must deprioritize Wikipedia’s content on issues related to Jews, Israel and the Middle East conflict so that they do not perpetuate this bias.

It should be a no-brainer to say that some subjects require considerable diligence to write a totally obective article about in Wikipedia or any other publication trying to be an encyclopedia, especially one that reports on current events, often within a few hours after they occur the way Wikipedia does. 

When it comes to the Middle East conflict I agree with the ADL that Wikipedia must get its act together before anyone can use it as an unbiased source. 

Consider what would happen if Wiki’s exhaustive entry of the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave credence to Putin’s claim that that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis committing genocide against the Russian minority in the Donbas, and said that Russia's goal was to "demilitarise and denazify" Ukraine. What if they went further and said, like Trump has, that Ukraine started the war?

The matter of Wikipedia in this instance has nothing to do with Trump and his manic effort to control the press. I haven’t seen any reports of him jumping on it to discredit Wikipedia because it accurately describes what he does. I doubt he knows how many members of both the media and the public count on it for factual information. This may change. Consider that in doing reseacrh for my Substack today I found this from a Fox News article published on March 7th:

Wikipedia co-founder calls on Elon Musk to investigate government influence over online encyclopedia

Excerpt:

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is calling on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to look into whether government actors have infiltrated the online encyclopedia that he helped start over two decades ago.

"Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia? Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we’d like to know. Agree?" Sanger recently wrote on X.

Sanger, who left the organization in 2002, has been a heavy critic of Wikipedia since about 2005, when he says the website began to drift into left-wing bias.

If what Larry Sanger is true this tarnishes the reputation of all of Wikipedia. It is not up to the government to investigate it. Musk and DOGE should keep their dirty hands off it. However, Wikipedia has to clean house themselves.

I often either provide a simple link to Wikipedia so people can learn more about a person or a subject. For example, above with ADL president Joseph Greenblatt, for readers who want to learn more about him I provided a link. In yesterday’s Substack I used quotes from Wikipedia from their entries on police state and martial law.

I have found entries related to Donald Trump to be unbiased. This is the main entry in a series of articles about him.

Trump would no doubt want the following from that entry scrubbed along with it’s internal links to other Wiki articles:

Trump is the central figure of Trumpism. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged, racist, or misogynistic. He has made false and misleading statements and promoted conspiracy theories to a degree unprecedented in American politics. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump attempted to overturn the outcome, culminating in the January 6 Capitol attackin 2021. In 2023, Trump was found liable in civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and for business fraud, and in 2024, he was found guilty of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Kamala Harris, Trump was sentenced to a penalty-free discharge, and two other felony indictments against him were dismissed.

Trump began his second term by pardoning around 1,500 January 6 rioters, initiating mass layoffs of the federal workforce, and starting a trade war with Mexico and Canada. Trump's broad and extensive use of executive orders has drawn numerous lawsuits challenging their legality.

Trump has already been on a crusade to control the media. He has banned the Associated Press from press conferences using the excuse of their refusing to accept that the Gulf of Mexico has to be called the Gulf of America. Of course this is bullshit. The AP reporters are known for asking tough questions. (The AP style book which is used by many journalists has addressed the Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America matter here.)

Wait for it, folks. How long before Musk sends his DOGE minions along with armed officers like he did at The United States Institute of Peace (read article) to break into Wiki’s San Francisco headquarters and kick out their staff and take over their computer servers? Of course, this could be problematic given this is San Francisco which is a sanctuary city, and Mayor Daniel Lurie might decide to order the SFPD to stop this.

For my recent Substacks about American politics click here.

For my readers as if we don’t have enough to worry about:

Keep New Bat Coronavirus On the Radar, Researchers Say

Trump and MAGA don’t want anyone to realize these are human beings:

Trump is engaged in two fights against democracy. Both involve agents armed with guns. Are we a nascent police state? By Hal M. Brown

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This is the main page of HUFFPOST this morning:

The news about Trump defying a federal judge’s order is all over the media. There are lotsa guns in that story. In this instance it is ICE agents. There’s another story with lotsa guns. Rachel Maddow reported on it last night. You can see the 10 minute segment in the RawStory article here.

This is from The New York Times (subscription):

Musk’s Team Evicts Officials at the U.S. Institute of Peace

A bubbling dispute broke into a dramatic standoff that ended with police involvement and the Department of Government Efficiency taking up residence at the independent agency.

Excerpt:

A simmering dispute between the Department of Government Efficiency and an independent agency dedicated to promoting peace broke into an open standoff involving the police on Monday, as Elon Musk’s government cutters marched into the agency’s headquarters and evicted its officials.

The dramatic scene played out in Washington on Monday afternoon as Mr. Musk’s team was rebuffed from the U.S. Institute of Peace, an agency that President Trump has ordered dismantled, then entered it with law enforcement officers. Agency officials say that because the institute is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk do not have the authority to gut its operations.

“DOGE just came into the building — they’re inside the building — they’re bringing the F.B.I. and brought a bunch of D.C. police,” Sophia Lin, a lawyer for the institute, said by telephone as she and other officials were being escorted out.

George Moose, who was fired as the institute’s acting president last week but is challenging his dismissal, accused Mr. Musk’s team of breaking in. “Our statute is very clear about the status of this building and this institute,” he told reporters. “So what has happened here today is an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private nonprofit corporation.”

If anyone still disputes the evidence that Trump is now a dictator who, when defied, is willing to use his own Gestapo and SS they have their head so deeply in the dirt that it may be poking into the Earth’s substrata. If they bury themselves too much deeper in denial it will get pretty damn hot for them.

How far will this go? There’s a name for the kind of country we could become. It is called a police state. At it’s extreme it looks like this.

This is the Wikipedia defintion:

A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

Russia and other totalitarian countries have their own versions.

Some of my friends say “it can’t happen here.” Others say it can happen here. I am seeing indications it is already happening and what we have is a nascent police state. Trump is testing the limits. Trump and Musk and their lieutenants want to see how far they can go. They don’t know what will happen but I am certain they have considered the possibility that there will be massive protests. I am just as sure that they have a contingency plan for this. They will wait until there’s a protest that gives Trump an excuse to say it is a national emergency and declare martial law.

From Wikipedia:

Martial law is the replacement of civilian government by military rule and the suspension of civilian legal processes for military powers. Martial law can continue for a specified amount of time, or indefinitely, and standard civil liberties may be suspended for as long as martial law continues. Most often, martial law is declared in times of war or emergencies such as civil unrest and natural disasters. Alternatively, martial law may be declared in instances of military coups d'état.

This would put the onus for carrying out unconstitutional, illegal, and un-American presidentiall on true patriots in the military. Would they bend to Trump and Hegseth or could we actually have a military coup d'état?

Update:

This is in response to Trump. But Trump has the guns. Roberts doesn’t. He depends on the respect for the rule of law.

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