Despots are Natural Magnets for Loons, Goons & Sadists

You know you live in an autocracy when those in charge are certifiably nuts. Welcome to the Trump administration and America's inevitable demise.

c/o Freepik AI

Trump administration officials these days quiver in fear of being “Loomered,” a MAGA era term for being summarily purged. Laura Loomer is a 31-year old far-right conspiracy theorist, failed politician and cosmetic surgery aficionado who holds a preternatural influence over the U.S. president. Like a Salem witch-hunter, her capricious targeting of senior officials for “disloyalty” is enough for Trump to fire them. These include a distinguished four-star general who headed the largest intelligence agency, NSA, as well as the U.S. Cyber Command, and his deputy; National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and his deputy; a Los Angeles assistant U.S. attorney; and Trump’s nominee to be surgeon general, whose crime was advocating the COVID-19 vaccine.

Loomer, who is Jewish, is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalist.” She claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job,” asserts that the “deep state” rigs the weather to influence elections, implies that the FBI lets school shootings happen in election years to help the Democrats push for gun control, and has called for the death penalty for Democrats who oppose Trump. She promotes Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, started the ludicrous claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets and said that billionaire George Soros’s son sent cryptic messages calling for Trump’s assassination. Again, this is a person who is a close advisor to the president of the United States.

Authoritarian regimes attract crackpots, sadists and the mentally ill. A biographer of Joseph Stalin wrote, “Throughout his life, Stalin’s detached magnetism would attract, and win the devotion of, amoral, unbounded psychopaths.” His three-decade reign of terror was manned by a veritable freak show of monstrous characters.

The murderous secret police chief and pedophile Lavrenty Beria topped the list. Others included the twisted agronomist Trofim Lysenko who rejected Mendelian genetics as a “bourgeois invention” in favor of “Marxist genetics” based Marxian dialectical transformation which conformed with the party’s program of creating the New Soviet Man and subduing nature for his benefit. (Got it?) Rejecting the concept of random mutations, Lysenko postulated that “science is the enemy of randomness.” Genetics was banned in the Soviet Union and over 3,000 biologists and scientists were fired, imprisoned, or executed for failing to conform to Lysenko’s bizarre beliefs. The field of genetics research was effectively destroyed in the Soviet Union until well after Stalin’s death.

Another was Alexei Gastev, an avant-garde poet-turned labor official who fostered the concept of the “scientific management of labor” which envisioned a system in which “the mechanical and human parts were virtually indistinguishable.” This included forcing workers to change their natural human motions of working to more efficient robotic movements as laid out in charts called “cyclograms.” For all his novel theorizing, Lysenko was rewarded with a bullet to the head during the Great Purge.

The Third Reich was a virtual Disneyland of madmen. Himmler was deep into the occult to justify bogus Nazi racial theories. Goering relied on astrologers. Josef Mengele and others performed cruel medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, including children. Sadistic senior SS officer Reinhard Heydrich chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference which formalized plans for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Julius Streicher, known as the “Beast of Franconia,” was so outrageous in his antisemitism that he embarrassed other senior Nazis, who condemned him.

As an antidote to “Jewish” physics, Nazi leaders promoted Hans Hörbiger’s world ice theory, which maintained that biblical events and the destruction of Atlantis were caused by moons of ice striking the Earth. Many Reich officials believed in Rudolf Steiner’s occult-inspired “biodynamic” approach to agriculture, based on the moon and planets’ cosmic rhythms. And on the list went — Rosenberg, Hess, Freisler, Frick, Ley, Sauckel, etc., from outright mass killers to crackpot theorists to eccentric misfits.

Which brings us back to the Trump administration. Having learned a lesson from his first term as president, Trump made amply sure this time around to exclude “adults in the room” from the senior echelons. In their place, he has installed a gaggle of sycophantic poseurs, frauds, sadists and mentally deranged who credibly could be cast in the next “Joker” movie.

With the exceptions of Treasury Secretary Bessent and Secretary of State Rubio, none of his choices for cabinet and other senior positions appear to have been made based on relevant professional qualifications. Attorney General Pam Bondi acts Trump’s Reichsjustizminister, a vocal toady ready to violate any constitutional norm to please her boss. Science denying HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in the model of lunatic Soviet agronomist Lysenko and the Nazi scientists, is living proof that superstition and twisted conspiracy thinking is monopolized neither by medieval serfs nor today’s political right (though the balance leans heavily in the latter’s direction). FBI Director Kash Patel epitomizes what happens when you promote someone from the outer limits of the lunatic fringe to run the nation’s premier law enforcement organization. Trade advisor Peter Navarro is a recent ex-convict and the mastermind behind Trump’s economic gravity-defying tariff policy, which most serious economists say will likely lead us into a recession and stagflation. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who grew up in a New Age cult, is widely suspected by intelligence experts of being a Russian asset. I wrote a profile a few years back on White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller noting his striking physical and moral resemblance Reinhard Heydrich. Laura Loomer, occupying no official position, can best be described as MAGA’s Madame Blavatsky.

And Trump’s carefully curated menagerie of morons, maniacs and miscreants goes on: strangelovean Mike Flynn, “alternate facts” Kellyanne Conway, anti-diplomat Rick Grennell, hangin’ judge Jeanine Pirro, medical school dropout Casey Means, QAnon king Dan Bongino, drunken (alleged) rapist Pete Hegseth, megalomaniacal Destroyer of Worlds Elon Musk, puppy-slayer/cosmetics queen Kristi Noem, etc., etc. With this crew in charge, fully expect the next pandemic, national security threat or economic failure to severely debilitate, if not destroy, us.

Here’s the thing: all past logic-defying authoritarian regimes eventually collapse due to their own internal contradictions and the incompetence of the deranged people who run them. Experts define autocracy in a number of ways: loss of personal freedoms, destruction of the rule of law, failure of political institutions, etc. I’ll add one of my own criteria: when your government is led by madmen. Thanks to sociopath Donald Trump, this is now what we have, a circus of the damned. We are already living in an autocracy. The only question is the degree of its control.

George Orwell said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” My statement of the obvious is this — Our society has been afflicted with a perverse psychology, combined with toxic politics, leading to mass delusion and runaway superstition. Donald Trump and his ilk have ushered us into a “post-truth” environment, of which it is incumbent upon the rest of us to end. The truth will set us free only if we believe in it. Otherwise, everyone is on his/her own. We’ve been taken over by madmen. If we don’t act now, America will join all the other self-destructed civilizations on the ash heap of history.