The shooting at a San Diego Islamic Center — allegedly carried out by teenagers — is just another reminder that we’ve built a culture fluent in dehumanization. It’s one where the people we disagree with aren’t just wrong but they’re our enemies. And enemies, as the logic goes, have forfeited their claim to safety. Pair that with brains that haven’t finished wiring themselves to grasp consequences, and the surprise isn’t that this happens. It’s that it doesn’t happen more.
To make matters worse, the institutions that used to help us make sense of moments like this are being gutted in real time — an FBI without principles, a CDC facing down an Ebola outbreak with no director and no Surgeon General.
Then there’s the matter of Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund. The number tells you everything you need to know about how serious they are about justice. It’s too cute by half, chosen for the symbolism. It was never meant to be taken seriously as policy. What it is, instead, is a loyalty payment: a message to anyone who might be asked to do something ugly down the line that the people who’ve already done ugly things on the boss’s behalf got taken care of.
Frank Figliuzzi sat down with former Congressman Adam Kinzinger to talk all of it through — the violence, Trump’s corruption, the state of faith and Christian nationalism, and whether the anti-Trump coalition can be a big enough tent to actually win. They also got to his children’s book and his documentary, The Last Republican. And somewhere in there, he may have let slip that he’s not done with public life.
This is a must-watch.
