The Unexpurgated Heart of Darkness: The Cult-ivation of Personality, Charismatic Evil and Motiveless Malignancy
[The following was copy edited once by me, Larry Mass, in trying to get it posted before the big ACT UP march tomorrow, Saturday, March 29, at 12 noon at the AIDS Memorial in NYC. I plan to be there. Hoping to see you there as well. Sorry for any typos or errors, and for several long sentences and my characteristic discursiveness.
…Following the demonstration, which went from the AIDS Memorial to the Tesla dealership in the far West Village, and which was ACT UP at its spirited, courageous best, with terrific posters and a rousing call to battle from ACT UP co-founder and leading UN and International AIDS Society advocate Eric Sawyer, I developed this piece further.
Someone asked if I weren’t retired. Yes, I’m now retired from my day jobs. But how do you retire from WW 3?]
by Lawrence D. Mass
A Deep Dive audio summary is available:
https://sentinelvoices.com/voices/authoritarianism.mp3
I’m a gay Jew who remains deeply, personally concerned about genocidal antisemitism and hateful, murderous transphobia and homophobia. As I understand them, my minority rights as gay and Jewish are bound up with fundamental precepts of democracy. As such, they must stand or fall alongside affirmation of human and civil rights across every divide of race, ethnicity, class, creed, health and politics. Which means I must and do stand up for tolerance of those whose beliefs are not only different from mine, but even for those inimical to me — e.g., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and religious extremists. Just as the American Civil Liberties Union in 1978 supported the rights of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish enclave with many Holocaust survivors, and again 40 years later, so I must continue to stand for their right to march as well.
For democracy to be sustained, first amendment rights of free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly must remain sacrosanct. Although I can deplore Islamist terrorism and Israeli settler and far-right violence in equal measure, I still can’t help but feel reflexively that the biggest missing piece of the puzzle of what I still call the Hamas-Israel war has been the failure of Hamas to be more clearly, widely and effectively held accountable for its war crimes. Until recently, this extremist terrorist Iran proxy and police-state-dictatorship occupier of Gaza has had unanimous Palestinian support. The failure of Hamas to respect human rights and return the hostages, in sync with the failure of Islamic peoples and the greater left-leaning world that still romanticizes Islamist extremism as robin-hoodism, seems to me to remain key to the great tragedy of Oct 7. The result, yet again, is a global failure to accurately articulate and denounce the genocidal anti-zionism and antisemitism that’s otherwise pervasive throughout Islam and just beneath the surface everywhere else.
My friends on the left, and I still have many, feel that Islamophobia is just as potent, malevolent and genocidal a force as antisemitism. Certainly it can be, especially in the context of what’s happening in Gaza under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right-coalition. And no prejudice should ever be held, in measure of suffering and consequences, as superior to another. But I disagree with them about the seriousness and urgency of comparative concerns on this front. This is especially true regarding Iran, longstanding as the world’s leading sponsor of regional and international terrorism. Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now 85, continues to call for the destruction of Israel with extremist rhetoric that dates back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. With some of the most primal fear I’ve known, I recall the fulminations of Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the world stage of the United Nations. Calling for the nuclearization of Iran, he repeatedly inveighed against Israel with a torrent of denunciations and threats that can only be described as Hitlerian.
That’s my vantage point. Surpassingly, however, I cannot and do not endorse retaliatory extremism on any side, and share human rights concerns for all. Especially for civilians caught in the crossfires. And I support the right of protestors everywhere to assemble and express their democratic privilege and human rights when and where they still have them — and when and where they don’t, as in Iran and Russia — of free speech and nonviolent protest, including civil disobedience.
In all-out war, which does happen (and sometimes rightly so), rules are inevitably broken. But that should never mean an abandonment of principles. Principles, standards and values are like religion. They can be influenced, reconfigured, coerced, quashed and betrayed. But to try to extort and extinguish them is to wage war on humanity itself. Put another way, maintaining spirituality — humanity — is the essence of the struggle between good and evil.
Which means, for example, that If you are zealously pro-Jewish and pro-Israel or zealously Pro-Palestinian and Islamist, to demand that others believe as you do in being anti-gay, misogynist, antisemitic, Islamophobic or otherwise racist, elitist and extremist, pursuing those beliefs to the extent that you are promoting and enforcing or even coddling arbitrary discrimination and persecution, then you are being antidemocratic and authoritarian. Rotten at its core, authoritarianism can never pass the smell test.
Yet again in America today and across the world, far-rightists, under the guise of patriotism, morality and religion, are claiming reverse discrimination with unprecedented legal, technological and disinformational skills and ruthless determination. With their pardoned, armed and stoked militias and with military resources under increasing pressure to fall in line with antidemocratic initiatives, they represent a five-alarm danger to what we used to a lot more confidently, but already now nostalgically, refer to as “the free world.”
The current leading figures in these authoritarian trends are Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. So it’s profoundly dismaying, having become a great frustration and challenge for me personally, to have to concede that President Trump, however he’s gotten there, has emerged as the dark horse with the most bully-pulpit cachet to conduct business here and abroad with dictators and oligarchies. More than any other figure, and however certain to abuse his incomparable power as he always has, he has acquired the greatest potential to help achieve cease fires and measures of stability in the Middle East, to rein in the Russia-Ukraine war, and tame China.
Meanwhile, however, the direction of the Trump presidency could not be more gravely concerning. Using the term “America’s Hitler” for the president he now serves, VP JD Vance expressed what many remain loathe to utter. On the one hand, everyone feels intimidated, worried about doxing and worse retribution, and on the other, grasping at straws of hope that the all-out Maoist cultural revolution Trump is emulating and fomenting is at least to some degree our delusion. In the disinformational mind games that strategically keep getting played, we are being driven subconsciously to become more convinced, as Trump and his stooges are wont always to imply, that somehow we — the “woke,” the DEI, the immigrants, the LGBTQ+, the “gender ideologists,” the “liberal elites,” the trans-drag-pronouns types, the Democrats, the practitioners of what Hitler and the Nazis called “Jewish intellectualism” — are the ones being paranoid, reactive and retaliatory. That we are the ones doing what we kept charging, impeaching and otherwise prosecuting Trump and his apparatchiks for doing: weaponizing the judicial system and politics. This boomerang pushback, always predictable, always inevitable, is the gospel of the authoritarian playbook.
Hitler isn’t the only authoritarian monster to have inspired comparisons to Trump. First, there was Kim Jong Un. Remember Trump’s “I understand you”? But the figure to garner Trump’s greatest and most shamelessly effusive, uncritical, unapologetic, unbreakable, and — why not finally say it? — treasonous emulation and collaboration has been Vladimir Putin. No one is any longer trying to pretend that that cat is not out of the bag, notwithstanding that Trump finally made one ostensibly bold, critical statement of frustration with Putin. (Was it cleared with Moscow first?)
What’s Greenland all about? Think Russia’s strategy, with Trump’s collusion, for the domination of Europe as well as the Arctic. Yes, think Hitler and Czechoslovakia. Especially now that Europe seeks to ally its defenses with Canada and other regional powers. While secret agreements between Trump and Putin — dismissed by Trump as “the Russia hoax” — may have served Trump in securing the presidency and Putin for reclaiming power in Europe and elsewhere, how allying ourselves with Russia could possibly play out as any kind of real win for America, the West and democracy could not be less clear. If it’s China we’re worried about, how would such an alliance work with NATO partners who, in danger within their own ranks of being engulfed by fascism, no longer trust us any more than they do Russia? The only plausible explanations remaining are looting for unfathomably deep oligarchical pockets and fear of Jeffrey-Epstein-world blackmail revelations beyond imagination.
Of course, in a police state dictatorship, once the public is sufficiently pummelled into submission with just the kinds of shock-and-awe tactics currently being unleashed, the emperor’s clothes can begin to seem all too real and even wondrous to behold. Fear of disappearing into the night or being thrown off your rooftop can be quite mollifying. It can’t happen here? Wake up. It already is. Are you watching what’s happening with the latest detentions and deportations?
Shock and awe is, of course, what happened in Germany at the outset of World War 2. In more recent memory, it’s the strategy George W. Bush pursued in Iraq. But let’s not forget that it was George W. Bush who established an unprecedented global AIDS initiative in Africa, which emerged as one of the greatest, most life- and cost-saving global health initiatives of any kind in history. In the current Trump slash-and-burn juggernaut, this premiere global health initiative, which has been so hugely successful in preventing and curbing the spread of AIDS as well as treating it, is being abruptly shut down, already with catastrophic consequences. Countless thousands worldwide are now without access to the life-saving medications that AIDS and science denialists like RFK JR — in lockstep with Trump in being outspokenly hostile to Anthony Fauci for narcissistically perceived “slights” (Uh, yes, Fauci knows science better than Trump, RFK JR and Marjorie Taylor Greene) — and the usual bevy of MAGA-niacal appartchiks couldn’t care less about. The last time this same betrayal of science happened, the result was the preventable deaths of a third of a million people, virtually all of them heterosexual. Under the leadership of South Africa’s AIDS-denialist President Thabo Mbeki, it was the single greatest catastrophe in the history of preventable deaths from disease in modern history.
Which brings to mind yet another anti-science catastrophe: the preventable loss of nearly half a million people in America during COVID because of the same science — mask, safe-space distancing, treatment and vaccine — denialism and defiance, as assessed by Trump’s appointed (along with Fauci) COVID chief, Dr. Deborah Birx. All because no one should ever have the temerity to correct the King of the Universe, and certainly not in public! Will that be Trump’s new title? That’s what Napoleon did. He had himself declared Emperor, just as Augustus Caesar did millennia before. Who, today, could doubt that Napoleon and Augustus carry far more status as role models for Trump than Lincoln, FDR or Churchill? Larry Kramer became famous and infamous for charaterizing the casualties of neglect of AIDS as murder and mass-murder. By this same calculus, Larry would certainly have indicted Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists as mass-murderers for the preventable deaths of half a million persons during the first wave of COVID.
Of pertinence here is Trump’s observation that the gross casualty count of the American Civil War could have been prevented had a better deal-maker been involved. With an opportunistic and not very credible “great concern” for war losses as his rationale for brokering peace negotiations in the Ukraine and Middle East wars while never previously seeming to care about the war atrocity casualties otherwise emerging at the hands of Russia and Syria, or currently in Gaza, Trump expects us to buy this packaging of himself as the great peacemaker. What would these peace deals look like? Let the Southern slavers retain their system, perhaps with a wrist tap or two. Same with Russia. Give them Ukraine on a silver platter minus a few concessions, territorial integrity and security guarantees not among them. Certainly, he will expect to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace, as Yassir Arafat did for his quickly, cynically betrayed efforts to participate in agreements with Israel, in advance of leading the first Intifada. SNL couldn’t make this stuff up. Meanwhile, nobody’s laughing.
Though of lesser status, another front runner in this name-the-dictator-who-has-the-biggest-claim-to-being-Trump’s-greatest-role-model sweepstakes has been Viktor Orban, a Putin toady, opportunist and NATO Quisling with little real power, known for his fox-like (as one Hungarian observer described him) cunning in making moves when it seems no one is looking or likely to stop him. I’ll show you how it’s done, the squat, bloated would-be Generalissimo (the term they used for Stalin and Franco) of one of Europe’s poorest countries with the highest unemployment rates seems to suggest. I’ll give my buddy Netanyahu a full-honors welcome in Hungary, even as I continue to antisemitically trash leading Jewish scapegoat George Soros. I’ll rescind my support of the ICC (which will win even more points with likewise indicted Putin) and crack down even harder on the beleaguered, defenseless, jobless, hopeless, poorly-served young people of Hungary, on immigrants desperately fleeing despotic regimes and the ragtag of LGBTQ+ kids who demonstrate with rainbow banners. In the interests of protecting family and Christian values, from now on Gay Pride celebrations will be forbidden. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Orban’s only son, Gaspar, is rumored, along with a significant cohort of Hungary’s Fidesz party, to be gay. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/02/hungary-rightwing-rulers-downplay-mep-jozsef-szajer-gay-orgy-scandal-amid-hypocrisy-accusations.).
Whatever the criticisms of Netanyahu, and however justified, he remains singular among far-right leaders in not himself expressing antigay rhetoric or promoting antigay legislation. Not yet. Like Orban, when it comes to politics, he’s in bed with antigay extremism (Putin, Trump-MAGA, Erdogan). For now, Israel remains alone among authoritarian nations in assimilating LGBTQ+ life, a reality cynically dismissed by the left as “pinkwashing.” No Islamic society is tolerant of openly LGBTQ+ people and culture, a fact about which the left remains resoundingly silent, as it mostly does as well regarding the status of women and antisemitism in Muslim cultures. In his last major address to Congress in the US, by contrast, Netanyahu cited Iran’s atrocities of hanging gay teenagers from cranes.
As for the dilemma of American Jews caught between having some appreciation for support against terrorism and antisemitism, even if it’s coming from distrustful far-right sources, the tension all Jews now feel is captured in an opinion piece in the New York Times: “Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews” (by J. David Goodman, 4/6/25).
“American Jews,” Goodman observes, “have watched with both alarm and enthusiasm as strong-arm tactics, including arrests of activists, have been deployed in their name…This is not going to protect Jews…We’re being used.”
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,” wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece.
Alas, there’s another figure lurking in the shadows who invites contemplation for understanding the present and accelerating dangers, one not yet bespoken in today’s evermore rancorous and fractious discourse. No, it’s not Stalin, who, let’s not forget, was crucial to the defeat of Nazi Germany, albeit after originally being in alliance with Hitler and later turning against Jews (the “Doctors Plot”) in the final paranoid years of his police state dictatorship. Nor is it Castro, Franco, Mussolini, Mao — simultaneously responsible for unprecedented elevations of the standard of living and mass murders of the Chinese populace — or his successor Xi, or Saudi’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman, nor any of history’s many other absolute potentates and power-and-grievance-intoxicated mountebanks, bloviators, ranters, tantrum throwers, murderers and mass-murderers.
Nor is it a parody of Latino machismo like Bolsonaro or Turkey’s somehow uniquely obnoxious Erdogan, in lockstep with Orban, Putin and Trump in stoking anti- LGBTQ+ animosity and bullying with the key strategy of all authoritarian regimes — minority scapegoating. In this eternal, always predictable strategy for establishing a coup d’etat, or any greater or lesser takeover, one minority may be or seem to be strategically premiere, even as all the others inevitably and quickly follow in tandem. Usually occurring in stages, this has shown itself to be an eternal, fundamental, always predicatable mechanism of consolidating political power. What police state dictatorship can you name that went after only one scapegoat?
As for the inconsistencies that quickly become glaringly apparent in political opportunists, what does Marco Rubio, who, like Erdogan, can radiate an intelligence, sincerity and authority easily mistaken as genuine, really believe? He’s certainly not going to tell us, Trump or anyone else, mostly because he, like the majority of Republicans, has committed so many circumstantial switcheroos and betrayals of principles that he himself no longer knows. No wonder people, who aren’t as dumb as everybody is prone or led to believe, say they hate politicians and lawyers.
Nor is that figure any one of a number of those vying for American yellow, tabloid, gaslighting and conspiracist journalism championships, like militant Trumpist maniac Tucker Carlson or scum-sucker and Trump crony Alex Jones. But let’s not let go of that last name just yet.
One thing one can never accuse Donald Trump of is being intellectually or culturally thoughtful. Unlike Putin, he can’t talk about stuff he could care less about, like the arts, history, or even the media beyond any relationship they might have to him personally or that’s not an obviously scripted talking point — e.g., the Confederate statues as pawns in the culture wars, putting his face (to be gold-plated?) on Mount Rushmore, being suddenly personally affected by the church spires felled by Russia in its hideous war of aggression against Ukraine, and the relentless attack-dog vilifying of “enemies of the people” (anyone criticizing him).
By contrast, Putin speaks several languages and can evince a sophisticated appreciation for music, composers, art, artists and literature. Under Putin, the vast, impressive resources of Russian culture, especially those of music, opera and dance, went global. The Metropolitan Opera became the Bolshoi West. The Russians were coming everywhere all at once. Notwithstanding his outlawing of virtually everything LGBTQ+, a position that kept gathering momentum in the wake of humiliating gay protests of Putin and Russia for their antigay rhetoric and bullying, alongside Russia’s exclusion from the events when its athletes were caught doping at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Putin, a rival with Trump for premiere grievance nurturer, can even acknowledge — if never affirm — that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Meanwhile, Putin’s homophbic savagery is increasingly cankerous. In addition to putting leading and award-winning trans journalist Masha Gessen on a wanted list for treason, Russia, which has the highest HIV rates in Europe, has now banned Elton John’s AIDS Foundation.
We know Trump has attended sports events, and has now elevated a fighting (wrestling/boxing) CEO to a cabinet position. And we know, keeping in mind the close relationship between Hitler and his right-hand man, openly gay Ernst Roehm, who Hitler eventually had assassinated in the Night of the Long Knives, based on allegations of homosexual degeneracy, of Trump’s crucial and sustained relationships with homosexual persons— Roy Cohn, Peter Thiel, Richard Grenell. Will Trump turn on them as Hitler did on Roehm, as “ LGBTQ+” is ratcheded up to first place for scapegoating, and will that come as a surprise? Not to me. But it’s likely to come as a surprise to everybody that when it comes to positioning a premiere scapegoat, the success Hitler had with Jews is likely to remain incomparable. Which in turn means that if and when the scapegoating of gays, immigrants, women and DEI proves inadequate and a much bigger one is needed to save a dictator, the Jews are likely to remain irresistible for big-time, all-out targeting. Meanwhile, has Trump ever attended a concert, opera, art exhibit or play, or has he ever read a book (apart from the book of Hitler’s speeches — or was it Mein Kampf ?— as attested by Ivana Trump in her divorce proceedings)?
Perhaps his takeover of the Kennedy Center will prove to be our revenge. However politicized against the woke it becomes symbolically, as its new overlord, Trump may feel new constraints not only to attend but to actually sit through some of these events. The new Kennedy Center will be under the direction of Richard Grenell. The events scheduled for next season, including the Scott Joplin opera, Treemonisha, will remain in place, as will the other announced works, except for the withdrawal by its creators, Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce, of the opera Fellow Travelers, about the anti-gay witch hunts of the McCarthy era. “We have made the impossibly difficult decision that the Kennedy Center is not a place the team feels comfortable having the work presented,” they said in a letter published in the New York Times 3/27/25.
So will this be the new version of Stalin declaring leading composers and artists to be politically incorrect, the way Hitler did for Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)? Like Stalin and Putin, but even more so, Hitler was deeply immersed in German culture, its art, architecture, artists, music and composers, especially the art of the figure still widely regarded as Germany’s greatest: Richard Wagner.
For all the persuasiveness of the depth of his antisemitism, Hitler might be even better understood as a robber baron who understood in his marrow, as did Crusaders and other European cohorts over centuries, that when it came to art and money, the Jews were a defenseless constituency like no other in being turkey-shoot prime for looting and scapegoating. This historical, universal human sociobiological pattern is otherwise known as marauding, pillaging, plundering and war, not infrequently to the extent of genocide. And its organizations of perpetration — heirarchies and structures of society, class and militarization — are what can collectively be called kleptocracies. Kleptocratic conquest was that simple in concept, organization and practice, and common historically as a principal tactic and policy. Kleptocratic confiscation is what we did with indigenous peoples here in America, in Africa and elsewhere. And kleptocratic incentive and conquest is easily discernible in the attitudes and policies of all of today’s forefront autocrats. The language and perspective I’m using here, of course, is that which the current extremist leadership of America is a priori committed to rendering illegitimate for documentation and discussion.
Prior to Hitler, no one — not even Genghis Kahn, Alexander the Great or the Roman emperors — was ever more immersed in such levels of confiscation and appropriation of peoples, property and art, in combination with a savagery of lust murderism heretofore unknown in scale and consequence. But such scapegoating of the weaker and defenseless is what they’re all doing and have always done, the game, the sport, they’re all always playing. Meanwhile, Hitler’s looting of European art was indeed on a much vaster scale than any previously known or documented and was grounded in his own experience of European art and culture, crowned with his personal devotion to genocidally antisemitic and premiere artistic appropriator and bully Richard Wagner as his premiere and sole spiritual mentor.
Apart from its being a glaringly missed opportunity for the Trump juggernaut, is there any even remote analogy of a significant figure from the worlds of American or any other arts or culture with any conceivable such relation to Donald Trump as Wagner was to Hitler? Wait, who is it that created the gold-plated toilet for Trump Tower? A Presidential Medal of Honor evening for Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight and Mel Gibson, who he has already appointed to be “Special Ambassadors to Troubled Hollywood”? That may sound sarcastic but it’s meant to be simply descriptive of a highly likely development, one that is likely to strike a chord of acceptance, support and enthusiasm in heartland America. Whatever we may think of their politics, as Americans and actors, these stars have become respected icons of American manhood, exceptionalism and chauvanism.
Finally, in the long, gory history of Roman dictatorships, we have Caligula, who still reigns historically supreme in seizing every opportunity to humiliate the “elitist” senators challenging his authority. In terms of the all-importance of dictatorial authority and loyalty for Trump, perhaps no figure better fits the description of role model.
But, no, the figure for comparison that keeps coming to mind for me with Trump is not any of these contestants for the dictatorship emulation championship sweepstakes we’re currently witness to.
The figure lurking in the shadows is a horse of an even darker color. How can one get darker than Hitler? Not easily, but Hitler is hardly alone in history’s vast realms of hell. There, he’s with his cohorts of the most extreme, unimaginably horrific, charismatic evil: Vlad the Impaler, Papa Doc, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Bashir Al Assad (about whose alliance with Putin Trump has yet to utter a critical word; on the contrary, his new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is an apologist for both Assad and Putin) and Charles Manson, to name a few.
The specter that increasingly comes to mind for me with Trump is that which emerges centrally in the Ryan Murphy Series, American Horror Story: Cult. He’s the Jonestown Guyana Massacre cult leader Jim Jones. Within this same aura of cult worship is Kurtz, the anti-hero of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, the “the horror, the horror” role played by Marlon Brando in the film, Apocalypse Now.
To “drink the kool aid” is a phrase now in common parlance. Everyone has used it, including Donald Trump.
What’s at the heart of this darkness? Malignant narcissism? Charismatic evil? Addiction to power? Lust murderism (an actual psychiatric term)? A sincere and credible commitment to making America great again? Trump has observed that such is his popularity and power over people that he can say or do anything — shoot somebody on 5th Ave — and get away with it, literally get away with murder. How far that boast could be stretched now seems a question that’s increasingly difficult to finesse or evade. As Hitler put it to his critics upon his ascension to full dictatorial power in response to their derisive contempt for him (think Bill Maher and SNL): no one’s laughing now!
We may never have a clear explanation for what psychiatry usually describes in terms like antisocial, narcissistic, narcissistic injury, paranoid, borderline, delusional and clinical and often attributes to disturbed childhoods. Charles Manson, who had a swastika tattooed on his forehead while in prison, had another description for it: helter skelter. For now, the best explanation we are likely to get for the current mega-spectacle of corruption and intoxication of power in the service of chaos and evil, for the collective and conjoined disorders of totalitarianism against conscience, decency, mercy, compassion and humanity, is from Shakespeare, once again in the zeitgeist of the current staging of Othello in New York with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal: motiveless malignancy.
So let’s say the current chaos and crisis keep devolving into what is inexorably WW 3. What perspective can we possibly have that’s hopeful? Well, if that trajectory has its nexus in another civil war here and another world where everywhere, history will indeed be on our side. The bad guys lost America’s first civil war, as they did the subsequent world wars. All we’ll need to repeat this history of good triumphing over evil is to get another Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Winston Churchill to lead us.
Takeaways
When it comes to villainy and culpability, the worst perpetrators are never the people. They are always their leaders.
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk will tell you every time they open their mouths, there is indeed one catchall enemy of the people that towers above all the others, even above loyalty: regulation.
Not only do dictators predominate globally and historically, they tend to have long tenures of rule. Among those of today and recent history, you have Franco, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Putin and Xi, persisting for multiple terms and decades in office.
My Medical Diagnosis as a Physician? Trump, Putin, Xi, Orban, Musk, Project 2025 and generic corruption are but symptoms of the aggressively malignant, inevitably fatal cancer of authoritarianism that is currently entering advanced stages of metastasization worldwide.
*See the New York Times story from 3/25/25: “Is Russia an Adversary or a Future Partner?”
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Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., is a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and was the first to write about AIDS in the press. In 2019 he was awarded GMHC’s Founders Activism Award. He is the author of Homosexuality and Sexuality: Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution, Volume 1, and Homosexuality as Behavior and Identity: Dialogues of The Sexual Revolution, Volume 2. He is the author/editor of an anthology, We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. He is the author of a memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America; of the sequel to that memoir, On the Future of Wagnerism: Art, Intoxication, Addiction, Codependence and Recovery; and the forthcoming Wayfaring With Ned Rorem: A Nonfiction Narrative. They form a trilogy Mass has designated as his Jewish Wagnerism Series. Mass has written widely on medicine, health and culture for mainstream and specialist publications. A recently retired physician specializing in addiction medicine, he resides in New York City and South Florida. Lawrencedmass.com
