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Trump and Musk Are the American Axis of Evil
The time for resistance is coming
Make no mistake: the United States of America is now in the hands of evil men. What was peril before has come to pass. An evil man and his evil cronies have seized the controls of the world’s largest military and economy and set about destroying the foundations of democratic freedom, assaulting the international order and undermining the world’s efforts to address the climate crisis. But what do I mean by “evil”? Surely evil is an old-fashioned concept in an age in which psychiatric diagnoses have largely replaced the language of moral judgement.
In my view it is entirely appropriate to invoke the concept of evil in the current political context, just as it is appropriate to use it to describe men such as Assad, Putin and Stalin. In his 1986 book The People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck argued for evil as a category distinct from mental illness, a state of moral failure in which a person makes a conscious choice to avoid all responsibility and growth. Goodness and truth are not merely avoided but actively resisted and attacked. These are people whose lives are built around deception — both of themselves and others.
Peck identified a number of characteristics of such people including narcissism, lies and deceptiveness, avoidance of responsibility, harming others to…
