The concrete Trump poured to destroy democracy is beginning to cure. How long will it take to be as strong as Hoover Dam? By Hal M. Brown

 

Kids and others sometimes write or make impressions in newly poured concrete sidewalks. This is from the web about the constructon of Hoover Dam: 

Once the bottom of the bucket opened up, it disgorged 6.1 m3 of concrete which was, generally, only a layer a couple of centimeters thick in that particular column. All this was done between June 1933 and June 1935The Hoover Dam concrete would cure in 125 years by conventional or natural methods. Crews, however, used some innovative engineering methods to hasten the process. Nearly 600 miles of steel pipes woven through the concrete blocks significantly reduced the chemical heat from the setting for the concrete. 

The construction of the dam was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over 100 lives. You can look at my illustration and make you own analogy.

Above: Before and after drawings.

Trump has already poured the concrete which cements his role as a ruthless do-what-he-damned-well pleases dictator. Screw the courts, turn on the full-court press. (I don’t like to use sports metaphors, but this one was too good.)

He is testing the limits each and every day. All of those trying to stop him are like those who make their mark in cement sidewalks. The concrete will cure no matter what and whatever they did with court rulings in their favor or crowds at rallies like Bernie and AOC are holding or protests around the country. Democracy loving people are making their mark but the concrete is relentlessly hardening.

The inspiration for today’s Substack came from my comments to my friend Sabrina Haake’s Substack today: The Roberts Court created this monster.

Among the many other things which I wrote in the comments I wrote the following:

“Trump has poured the cement of his ruthless dictatorship. It is rapidly setting. Soon it will be as hard as the concrete in Hoover Dam. Before long nobody will bother taking Trump to court. Protests will not only be futile, they will dangerous.” 

Then I thought this was a good idea to expand on in my Substack.

Read my recent Substacks:

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.)

Best to subscribe to my free Substack here.

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

 .

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: