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This.

Musk is trying to normalize selective empathy (he’s said that empathy is the West’s “greatest weakness”), because an expanded and inclusive view of humanity is one of the common features of people with moral courage. To recruit ppl to his project, he needs them to think and be small, like him.

Lots of moral “off ramps” are offered to help people feel OK about not including the out-group in their moral code like moral justification (“we must preserve the white race”) and dehumanization, among others. This is what @gregsargent.bsky.social is highlighting and it is very, very dangerous 3/

Things like genocide and even lesser evils happen bc the sociopaths at the top give ordinary people a permission structure. They have a “moral code,” but it only applies to a select group of people. Those not in that group are beyond the realm of human or moral obligation. 2/

🧵 This piece is really important, because it gets to something that is a prerequisite for and recurring feature of atrocities worldwide: selective empathy. Most people assume that when atrocities happen, it’s bc everyone involved is a sociopath. Some are. But not all. 1/

“History tells us it only takes 3.5 percent of the population to stand up for authoritarians to topple. They’re very fragile.” @asharangappa.bsky.social on the growing pushback against Trump. Join us on Substack: open.substack.com/pub/thefrank...

In the age of Trump, Reform, Restore and the rest of the bad faith actors, @asharangappa.bsky.social explores how "we develop moral muscle to stand up for #democracy" open.substack.com/pub/asharang...

Schatz has the same pathology as Newsom: a need to show "I'm just like you" to awful people with bad values. It's not even cynicism; it yields no additional votes. Destroying USAID was an illegal act by white nationalists with genocidal intent and it has killed people. That's more than just "bad."

Emmett Till would have been 85 today (b. 7/25/1941). The 14-year-old Chicagoan was brutally murdered by white men while visiting relatives in Miss. in 1955. His murder & the acquittal of the killers made Till an icon of the civil rights movement. Image: Public domain photo taken by Till’s mother.

Impeach this corrupt villain

BREAKING: In my lawsuit against Todd Blanche for the Epstein Files, Judge Sullivan has just ordered Blanche to produce, in camera (in chambers), the UNREDACTED emails & documents, and Blanche must bring documentation supporting his representations the DOJ’s redactions are what he claims they are.

Would love to know what you teach!

👏🏼EX post citing Milgram & Bandura’s work & behavioral phenomenons I teach abt regularly: if you justify compromising your integrity & think you “got away” w/ it, you’re more likely to do it again-BUT if you’re self-aware, self-honest & a have a strong moral compass you CAN choose to course-correct.

We're well along on the slippery slope of complicity. Stopping now "would take a level of honesty, self-awareness, and humility that most ordinary people don’t possess … and which is in even shorter supply (if not nonexistent) in today’s Republican Party."

This experiment

Smart analysis on why GOP won't draw a line on Trump's demands. "The literature on complicity describes how this incremental acclimation operates even with the most violent and brutal behavior." She quotes former FBI Director James Comey: “Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites."

For this week's Substack, I wrote about the phenomenon of "gradual escalation" as illustrated by the Milgram experiment, and why we are already well into the high-voltage shocks asharangappa.substack.com/p/will-todd-...

interesting to me that as the administration treats democratic-voting states like conquered or occupied territories, you don’t have pundits demanding the president respect “half the country”

After ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Araujo, the FBI leaked to Fox News a claim that he was found with possible meth in the van. His family said it was a total falsehood; it was a bag of salt to be used to make an electrolyte drink. And they were right. It was not drugs.

This case is slightly different from the others in that KY is within the 6th Circuit, which recently ruled against DOJ on very similar facts. The judge had to follow that holding whether she agreed with it or not. Obligatory link to my piece on this issue: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...