TBR News May 8, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. May 7, 2020: Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it. “
Comment for May 8, 2020:” Dealing with Trump, at a high level, is like trying to herd cats or pick up mercury. Not possible. He waffles, lies, erupts and generally behaves like the ero-centric they are. Here is a clear description of the narcissist. “In psychological terms, narcissism doesn’t mean self-love—at least not of a genuine sort. It’s more accurate to say that people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are in love with an idealized, grandiose image of themselves. And they’re in love with this inflated self-image precisely because it allows them to avoid deep feelings of insecurity. But propping up their delusions of grandeur takes a lot of work—and that’s where the dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors come in.
Narcissistic personality disorder involves a pattern of self-centered, arrogant thinking and behavior, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. Others often describe people with NPD as cocky, manipulative, selfish, patronizing, and demanding. This way of thinking and behaving surfaces in every area of the narcissist’s life: from work and friendships to family and love relationships.
People with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely resistant to changing their behavior, even when it’s causing them problems. Their tendency is to turn the blame on to others. What’s more, they are extremely sensitive and react badly to even the slightest criticisms, disagreements, or perceived slights, which they view as personal attacks. For the people in the narcissist’s life, it’s often easier just to go along with their demands to avoid the coldness and rages. However, by understanding more about narcissistic personality disorder, you can spot the narcissists in your life, protect yourself from their power plays, and establish healthier boundaries.
Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder
Grandiose sense of self-importance
Grandiosity is the defining characteristic of narcissism. More than just arrogance or vanity, grandiosity is an unrealistic sense of superiority. Narcissists believe they are unique or “special” and can only be understood by other special people. What’s more, they are too good for anything average or ordinary. They only want to associate and be associated with other high-status people, places, and things.
Narcissists also believe that they’re better than everyone else and expect recognition as such—even when they’ve done nothing to earn it. They will often exaggerate or outright lie about their achievements and talents. And when they talk about work or relationships, all you’ll hear is how much they contribute, how great they are, and how lucky the people in their lives are to have them. They are the undisputed star and everyone else is at best a bit player.
Lives in a fantasy world that supports their delusions of grandeur
Since reality doesn’t support their grandiose view of themselves, narcissists live in a fantasy world propped up by distortion, self-deception, and magical thinking. They spin self-glorifying fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, attractiveness, and ideal love that make them feel special and in control. These fantasies protect them from feelings of inner emptiness and shame, so facts and opinions that contradict them are ignored or rationalized away. Anything that threatens to burst the fantasy bubble is met with extreme defensiveness and even rage, so those around the narcissist learn to tread carefully around their denial of reality.
Needs constant praise and admiration
A narcissist’s sense of superiority is like a balloon that gradually loses air without a steady stream of applause and recognition to keep it inflated. The occasional compliment is not enough. Narcissists need constant food for their ego, so they surround themselves with people who are willing to cater to their obsessive craving for affirmation. These relationships are very one-sided. It’s all about what the admirer can do for the narcissist, never the other way around. And if there is ever an interruption or diminishment in the admirer’s attention and praise, the narcissist treats it as a betrayal.
Sense of entitlement
Because they consider themselves special, narcissists expect favorable treatment as their due. They truly believe that whatever they want, they should get. They also expect the people around them to automatically comply with their every wish and whim. That is their only value. If you don’t anticipate and meet their every need, then you’re useless. And if you have the nerve to defy their will or “selfishly” ask for something in return, prepare yourself for aggression, outrage, or the cold shoulder.
Exploits others without guilt or shame
Narcissists never develop the ability to identify with the feelings of others—to put themselves in other people’s shoes. In other words, they lack empathy. In many ways, they view the people in their lives as objects—there to serve their needs. As a consequence, they don’t think twice about taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends. Sometimes this interpersonal exploitation is malicious, but often it is simply oblivious. Narcissists simply don’t think about how their behavior affects others. And if you point it out, they still won’t truly get it. The only thing they understand is their own needs.
Frequently demeans, intimidates, bullies, or belittles others
Narcissists feel threatened whenever they encounter someone who appears to have something they lack—especially those who are confident and popular. They’re also threatened by people who don’t kowtow to them or who challenge them in any way. Their defense mechanism is contempt. The only way to neutralize the threat and prop up their own sagging ego is to put those people down. They may do it in a patronizing or dismissive way as if to demonstrate how little the other person means to them. Or they may go on the attack with insults, name-calling, bullying, and threats to force the other person back into line. (helpguide)

The Table of Contents
• The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected
• Trump and the Numbers Game
• Great Depression-like U.S. job losses, unemployment rate expected in April
• For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection
• The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements i

The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected
News Corp is campaigning full-bore for the US president, with reports of a Wuhan lab ‘intelligence’ dossier being seeded across its empire
May 7, 2020
by Kevin Rudd
The Guardian
In liberal democracies, the integrity, impartiality and professionalism of intelligence agencies matters. That’s why it is essential that intelligence agencies remain aloof, not only from the political debates of the day, but also from the policy decisions that individual governments may take. The intelligence community’s core task is to provide brutally realistic analysis on the threat environments we face so that governments can then make the best-informed policy decisions possible to preserve our common security.
The failures of the intelligence community before the Iraq war, the gullibility of much of the western media, as well as the cynical manipulation of both by the political class of the day, provide us with a stark reminder of what can go radically wrong. On 8 September 2002 the New York Times published one of this century’s most consequential news articles. The front-page story, supplied by the Bush administration, claimed that Saddam Hussein had stepped up his quest for weapons of mass destruction by acquiring key components for a nuclear weapon. In the UK, the Blair government’s “dodgy dossier” compounded the error. John Howard did the same in Australia. The problem was that it just wasn’t true. These were over-egged stories designed to soften the public up for what would become a disastrous war.
The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 casts a long shadow. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, first in the invasion, then the ensuing chaos, then in the rise and fall of Islamic State. It strengthened Iran’s hand in both Iraq and Syria. It contributed to a massive outflow of refugees across the world, a factor in the resurgence of the far right across Europe. And Washington has spent nearly two decades trapped in a Middle Eastern mess of its own making, diverting much of its attention from China’s regional and global rise.
Lies were reported as facts. Credible sceptics were downplayed, ignored or attacked as unpatriotic “appeasers”. The thrill of landing a big “story” overtook the media’s fundamental duty to prevent the public from being deceived. Journalists who believed they were muscling up to a looming security threat turned out to be working instead against their own countries’ long-term interests. And in all this the Murdoch media were leading the pack across the anglosphere as the unrelenting cheerleaders for war – and vilifying those, like me, who opposed it.
This brings us to the Covid-19 pandemic and the public health and economic mayhem it has unleashed across the globe. The sheer magnitude of the damage means that the people of the world have every right to know how this came about. Whether China’s new class of “wolf warrior” diplomats care to recognise it or not, there are fundamental questions we can all legitimately demand answers to. These include the origin of the virus in Wuhan; whether the earliest genetic evidence of the outbreak has been properly preserved for independent research; the danger of wildlife “wet markets” in the transmission of such viruses; what delays occurred in notifying central authorities; why some local medical staff were either silenced or punished; what delay occurred in notifying the World Health Organization of human-to-human transmission, given China’s obligations under the relevant international health regulations. There are also fundamental questions on whether the WHO properly discharged its mandate to provide clear and early warnings to the international community. And whether national governments took all necessary actions to prepare for the virus reaching their own shores, or whether these warnings were effectively ignored – as appears to have been the case in the US.
But amid all these questions, and the parallel debate about the mechanism now needed to conduct an effective international inquiry, we suddenly have a unilateral declaration by the US president and his secretary of state that the body of evidence overwhelmingly points to the virus having leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where research projects have been under way into various categories of coronavirus borne by bats. They claim a “high degree of confidence” in this theory, citing compelling but as-yet undisclosed evidence – despite the US director of national intelligence issuing a rare public statement disparaging this theory.
Enter the “global exclusive” story of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian Daily Telegraph last weekend, headlined “China’s batty science – bombshell dossier lays out the case against the People’s Republic”. The paper claims to have been leaked a 15-page research dossier prepared by unnamed “western governments” on the Chinese government’s culpability for the outbreak. The clear inference from the Telegraph report is that the document was prepared by the “Five Eyes” intelligence community linking the US, UK, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand intelligence services. Other Murdoch journalists, re-reporting the story, have expressly stated it was a Five Eyes document. While the article itself shies away from stating explicitly the document’s authorship, the newspaper goes on to detail a number of investigatory actions being undertaken by the Five Eyes to nail the Chinese state’s responsibility.
The most critical part of the Telegraph newspaper report deals with apparent divisions among the wider intelligence community on the authenticity of the “Wuhan laboratory leak” thesis. And it’s here that Murdoch’s paper becomes explicit in its assertion that the Five Eyes research dossier helps validate the as-yet-unproven claim by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo that the virus was “invented” at the Wuhan laboratory. The article and associated stories are laced with colourful reporting about Chinese “bat virus” researchers – “bat men”, “bat women” and other tales from the Wuhan bat cave. Nonetheless, having delivered its political ordinance in support of Trump and Pompeo, the Murdoch story carefully and cleverly seeks to cover its traces by stating repeatedly that nothing is yet proven about the laboratory leak.
The Murdoch journalist in question, Sharri Markson, a few days later pops up as the prime interview on the Murdoch-owned US cable TV network Fox News. The interviewer is none other than Trump’s personal favourite, Tucker Carlson, who together with Sean Hannity are his cheerleaders-in-chief in the American media. Right on cue, Tucker chimes in that the dossier “is the most substantial confirmation of what we’ve suspected that we’ve had so far” and that “because it’s a multinational effort I think it would be hard to dismiss it as a political document”.
he truth is, at this stage, none of us know definitively whether the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory. The best we can do is accept the Australian government’s assertion that this is at best a 5% possibility. Politically, the bottom line is that the leak of this alleged Five Eyes intelligence dossier to the Murdoch media in Australia, before being resold back into the US political audience by the very same Murdoch media, appears designed to back Trump’s and Pompeo’s claim. But this time with the added “authenticity” factor of the dossier being “multinational” and not just a normal drop from the White House to Fox, which have become a dime a dozen.
This is all about US presidential politics. There are three issues in this campaign: Trump’s handling of the virus; how to dig the US out of its virus-induced economic hole; and who can be most hardline on China – the Donald or “Beijing Biden”, as the Republicans now seek to tag his Democratic opponent. There’s little else on the table. Therefore, using an intelligence leak pushing Chinese culpability, laundered through a foreign country, turbocharged with the credibility factor of being an alleged Five Eyes product, helps the partisan political cause. And let’s be clear: Murdoch is campaigning full-bore for Trump.
Here are questions now for the Australian government and potentially its Five Eyes partners. First, was this an “intelligence” product, or was it simply open source material derived from information in the public domain? Second, was it an authorised Five Eyes product, or was just prepared in the US? Third, who leaked it, given that leaking such material is a criminal offence – as the US has made plain in its handling of Chelsea Manning’s and Julian Assange’s cases that included the large-scale unauthorised release of
classified Five Eyes material. Were any ministers of the Australian government complicit in this? Or was the US embassy in Canberra involved? If the Australian government is serious about the protection of classified documents, then why hasn’t a full police investigation been commissioned? Or is the government fearful of what it might discover if, as is likely, the leak has been driven by political and electoral interests within the US.
The extent to which the Australian intelligence community has sought to distance itself from the “dossier” suggests it does not wish to be in any way drawn into domestic politics – either Australian or American. The British intelligence community is reportedly doing the same. This is good. These institutions appear to have learnt from the Iraq war fiasco and the political abuse of intelligence agencies that occurred at that time. But on this question, the bitter lessons of Iraq appear to have been lost on Trump and the Murdoch empire that supports him.
China has much to answer for, including the ultimate origins of the virus. But if Trump’s claim in the Wuhan laboratory saga ultimately ends up being disproven, either by the Five Eyes or by US intelligence itself, then the irony is that the net political winner will be China. Remember the humiliation when no WMD were found in Iraq? Beijing would seek to exonerate itself as a result of egregious presidential overreach – once again aided and abetted by the Murdoch media. This is why the watchword of any sophisticated intelligence agency is caution in endorsing premature conclusions until all the facts are on the table.

Trump and the Numbers Game
There were 56.5 million Hispanics in the United States in 2015, accounting for 17.6% of the total U.S. population.
The Hispanic Mexican population of the United States is projected to grow to 107 million by 2065.
The share of the U.S. population that is Hispanic has been steadily rising over the past half century. In 2015, Hispanics made up 17.6% of the total U.S. population, up from 3.5% in 1960, the origins of the nation’s Hispanic population have diversified as growing numbers of immigrants from other Latin American nations and Puerto Rico settled in the U.S.
For example, between 1930 and 1980, Hispanics from places other than Mexico nearly doubled their representation among U.S. Hispanics, from 22.4% to 40.6%. But with the arrival of large numbers of Mexican immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s, the Mexican share among Hispanics grew, rising to a recent peak of 65.7%.
California has the largest legal poplation of Mexicans, 14,013,719. And California is also home to almost 25% of the country’s undocumented population. California is followed by Texas where 31.14%,(8,500,000) are Mexican, Florida has 4,223,806 Mexicans, Illinois 2,153,000, Arizona,1,895,149, Colorado, 1,136,000 Georgia, 923,000, North Carolina, 890,000, and Washington, 858,000 Mexicans.
Given the fact that President Trump has strong personal dislikes for both Blacks and Latinos, manifest in his recent vicious treatment of Mexican immigrants in their legal attempts to immigrate to the United States, the sheer number of Mexicans now resident in the United States ought to give him, and his far-right Republican Congressional supporters serious pause in their denial of entrance for legal immigrant attempts and the subsequent brutal maltreatment of small children of these immigrants.
If the Mexican voting population of the United States were to organize, like the recent organizing of the black voting population of Alabma in opposition to the fanatical Judge Moore, the results in the November elections could well prove to be a stunning disaster for both Trump and the Republicans.
Numbers certainly count but Trump is obviously unaware of their potential danger, both to him and his right-wing radical supporters.

Great Depression-like U.S. job losses, unemployment rate expected in April
May 8, 2020
by Lucia Mutikani
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. economy likely lost a staggering 22 million jobs in April, in what would be the steepest plunge in payrolls since the Great Depression and the starkest sign yet of how the novel coronavirus pandemic is battering the world’s biggest economy.
FILE PHOTO: People who lost their jobs wait in line to file for unemployment following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at an Arkansas Workforce Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas, U.S. April 6, 2020. REUTERS/Nick Oxford
A report that is closely watched in any given month but especially so now with non-essential businesses in mandatory shutdowns nationwide to contain the coronavirus, the Labor Department’s monthly employment report on Friday is also expected to show the jobless rate surging to at least 16% last month. That would shatter the post-World War Two record of 10.8% touched in November 1982.
The numbers will likely strengthen analysts’ expectations of a slow recovery from the recession caused by the pandemic. It would add to a pile of bleak data on consumer spending, business investment, trade, productivity and the housing market in underscoring the devastation unleashed by lockdowns imposed by states and local governments in mid-March to slow the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus.
The economic crisis spells trouble for President Donald Trump’s bid for a second term in the White House in November’s election. After the Trump administration was criticized for its initial reaction to the pandemic, Trump is eager to reopen the economy, despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and dire projections of deaths.
“Our economy is on life support now,” said Erica Groshen, a former commissioner of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. “We will be testing the waters in the next few months to see if it can emerge safely from our policy-induced coma,” added Groshen, who is now a senior extension faculty member at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
The historic dive in April nonfarm payrolls predicted in a Reuters survey anticipates job losses in nearly all sectors of the economy, with larger layoffs in the leisure and hospitality industry – mainly restaurants and bars. It would follow the shedding of 701,000 jobs in March, which ended a record streak of employment gains dating to October 2010.
Estimates in the survey ranged to as much as a loss of 35 million. Forecasts for April’s unemployment rate, which was at 4.4% in March, were as high as 22%.
There is great uncertainty surrounding last month’s estimates because of the nature and speed of the job losses.
A total of 26.5 million people had filed claims for jobless benefits and 16.2 million were on unemployment rolls through the week of April 12, when the government canvassed establishments and households for payrolls and the unemployment rate.
Eligibility for unemployment benefits has been greatly expanded to include contractors and gig workers among others, overwhelming local employment offices with applications and leading to backlogs. Economists believe the numbers of people applying for unemployment aid and those continuing to receive benefits are understated.
Meanwhile, some people might be filing more than one claim, and workers whose hours have been cut because of COVID-19 can also seek unemployment benefits.
GREAT UNCERTAINTY
Some workers who have filed claims have likely since found employment, with companies like Walmart and Amazon hiring workers to meet huge demand in online shopping. Truck drivers are also in demand, while supermarkets, pharmacies and courier companies need workers.
According to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the employment report, a person has to be looking for work and available to do it to be considered unemployed.
“This means many workers who lose their job as a result of the virus will be counted as dropping out of the labor force instead of as unemployed because they are unable to search for work due to the lockdown, or because they are not available to work because they are, for example, caring for children whose school has closed,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department.
Furloughed workers and others who expect to return to their jobs within 6 months are counted as unemployed on temporary layoff.
A drop in the labor force participation rate, or the proportion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one, could blunt some of the anticipated surge in the unemployment rate in April.
To get a clearer picture, economists will focus on a broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who want to work but have given up searching and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
April could, however, mark the trough in job losses as more small businesses access their portion of an almost $3 trillion fiscal package, which made provisions for them to get loans that could be partially forgiven if they were used for employee salaries. The Federal Reserve has also thrown businesses credit lifelines and many states are also partially reopening.
Still, economists do not expected a quick rebound in the labor market.
“Given the expected shift in consumer behavior reflecting insecurities regarding health, wealth, income, and employment, many of these firms will not reopen or, if they do reopen, hire fewer people,” said Steve Blitz, chief economist at TS Lombard in New York. “This is one reason why we see the underlying recession extending through the third quarter.”
Economists say the economy entered recession in late March, when nearly the whole country went into COVID-19 lockdowns.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the private research institute regarded as the arbiter of U.S. recessions, does not define a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real gross domestic product, as is the rule of thumb in many countries. Instead, it looks for a drop in activity, spread across the economy and lasting more than a few months.
Reporting By Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama

For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection
The U.S. high court’s continual refinement of an obscure legal doctrine has made it harder to hold police accountable when accused of using excessive force
May 8, 2020
by Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, JackieBotts, Andrea Januta and Guillermo Gomez
Reuters
Staff at the local hospital in tiny Madill, Oklahoma, called the police in the early evening of March 24, 2011, for help giving Johnny Leija an injection to calm him. Security cameras captured much of the ensuing encounter.
The officers, after shooting Leija with a stun gun, follow him down a corridor, shock him again, and wrestle him to the floor. One officer then straddles Leija’s back, trying to handcuff him as the others struggle to pull back his arms. They get one handcuff on. Leija goes limp. The officers step back. Hospital staff drop to Leija’s side and begin a futile effort to resuscitate him.
The Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Leija, his lungs already compromised by pneumonia, was starved for oxygen in his struggle with the police and died from “respiratory insufficiency.”
The county sheriff and the Madill police chief defended the officers’ actions as appropriate to the situation. The cops were not charged with any wrongdoing.
Erma Aldaba, however, blamed the officers for her son’s death. “My son wasn’t a criminal, my son was sick,” she said in an interview.
So Aldaba took the only other route open to people in her situation: She sued. Her lawsuit in federal district court in Muskogee, Oklahoma, alleged that the three officers used excessive force, violating her son’s civil rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
But almost immediately, her case hit a formidable obstacle: a little-known legal doctrine called qualified immunity. This 50-year-old creation of the U.S. Supreme Court is meant to protect government employees from frivolous litigation. In recent years, however, it has become a highly effective shield in thousands of lawsuits seeking to hold cops accountable when they are accused of using excessive force.
Excessive force, zero justice
Even when courts find police used too much force, they still often grant immunity. Here are just a few of those cases.
At first, it looked like Aldaba would clear the hurdle. The judge hearing her case, and then a federal appeals court, rejected the officers’ claim of qualified immunity.
The appeals panel based its decision on a two-question test courts use to weigh police requests for immunity. The first is whether the evidence shows or could convince a jury that the officers used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The second question is whether the officers should have known they were breaking “clearly established” law – a Supreme Court coinage for a court precedent that had already found similar police actions to have been illegal.
To both questions, the court determined, the answer was yes.
Then, at the officers’ request, the Supreme Court intervened. The justices ordered the appeals court to reconsider its ruling, indicating that they disagreed with the lower court.
Back at the appeals court, Aldaba’s lawyer argued, as he had the first time around, that the cops’ treatment of Leija was “clearly established” as illegal. To support his argument, he cited earlier cases in which police were held liable for using excessive force on unarmed, mentally compromised people. Not similar enough, the court now said, so the cops had no reason to think they were breaking the law. The police got immunity. Aldaba’s case was dead.
“It makes me feel that there was a mistake, but we can’t win,” Aldaba, 60, said. “We can’t win fighting the cops.”
Qualified immunity: Grant or deny?
Appellate courts apply a two-part test to determine whether to grant immunity to police accused of using excessive force. Here’s how the test was applied in 252 cases from 2015 to 2019.
In part one, the court considers whether police used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
If yes, the court moves to part two of the test.
If no, qualified immunity is immediately granted.
Since 2009, the Supreme Court has allowed appellate courts to skip part one. Courts have increasingly chosen this option.
In part two, the court determines whether police should have known their actions violated the Constitution because court precedent clearly established their conduct as unlawful.
If yes, the case goes to trial.
If no, qualified immunity is granted.
In more than half of the cases during this period, the court granted immunity to the police.
Effective barrier
Aldaba’s lament has become an increasingly common one. Even as the proliferation of police body cameras and bystander cellphone video has turned a national spotlight on extreme police tactics, qualified immunity, under the careful stewardship of the Supreme Court, is making it easier for officers to kill or injure civilians with impunity.
The Supreme Court’s role is evident in how the federal appeals courts, which take their cue from the high court, treat qualified immunity. In an unprecedented analysis of appellate court records, Reuters found that since 2005, the courts have shown an increasing tendency to grant immunity in excessive force cases – rulings that the district courts below them must follow. The trend has accelerated in recent years. It is even more pronounced in cases like Leija’s – when civilians were unarmed in their encounters with police, and when courts concluded that the facts could convince a jury that police actually did use excessive force.
Reuters found among the cases it analyzed more than three dozen in which qualified immunity protected officers whose actions had been deemed unlawful. Outside of Dallas, Texas, five officers fired 17 shots at a bicyclist who was 100 yards away, killing him, in a case of mistaken identity. In Heber City, Utah, an officer threw to the ground an unarmed man he had pulled over for a cracked windshield, leaving the man with brain damage. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, an officer shot a man in a mental health crisis who was stabbing himself and trying to slit his own throat.
The increasing frequency of such cases has prompted a growing chorus of criticism from lawyers, legal scholars, civil rights groups, politicians and even judges that qualified immunity, as applied, is unjust. Spanning the political spectrum, this broad coalition says the doctrine has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.
The high court has indicated it is aware of the mounting criticism of its treatment of qualified immunity. After letting multiple appeals backed by the doctrine’s critics pile up, the justices are scheduled to discuss privately as soon as May 15 which, if any, of 11 such cases they could hear later this year.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s most liberal members, and Clarence Thomas, its most conservative, have in recent opinions sharply criticized qualified immunity and the court’s role in expanding it.
In a dissent to a 2018 ruling, Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote that the majority’s decision favoring the cops tells police that “they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”
In that case, Kisela v. Hughes, the justices threw out a lower court’s ruling that denied immunity to a Tucson, Arizona, cop who shot a mentally ill woman four times as she walked down her driveway while holding a large kitchen knife.
A year earlier, Sotomayor in another dissent called out her fellow justices for a “disturbing trend” of favoring police. “We have not hesitated to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity,” Sotomayor wrote, citing several recent rulings. “But we rarely intervene where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity.”
Sotomayor was responding to the majority’s decision not to hear an appeal brought by Ricardo Salazar-Limon, who was unarmed when a Houston police officer shot him in the back, leaving him paralyzed. A lower court had granted the officer immunity.
The Reuters analysis supports Sotomayor’s assertion that the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police. Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did. The court’s acceptance rate for police appeals seeking immunity was three times its average acceptance rate for all appeals. For plaintiffs’ appeals, the acceptance rate was slightly below the court’s average.
In the cases it accepts, the court nearly always decides in favor of police. The high court has also put its thumb on the scale by repeatedly tweaking the process. It has allowed police to request immunity before all evidence has been presented. And if police are denied immunity, they can appeal immediately – an option unavailable to most other litigants, who typically must wait until after a final judgment to appeal.
“You get the impression that the officers are always supposed to win and the plaintiffs are supposed to lose,” University of Chicago law professor William Baude said. In his research, Baude has found that qualified immunity, as a doctrine, enjoys what he calls “privileged status” on the Supreme Court, which extends to cases the court decides without even hearing arguments – a relatively rare occurrence. In such cases, the court disproportionately reversed lower courts’ denials of immunity.
All nine current justices declined to be interviewed for this article. They have offered few explanations of the court’s stance on qualified immunity beyond writing in opinions that the doctrine balances individuals’ rights with the need to free officials from the time-consuming and costly burden of unnecessary litigation
Defining ‘clearly established’
The main challenge for plaintiffs in excessive force cases is to show that police behavior violated a “clearly established” precedent. The Supreme Court has continually reinforced a narrow definition of “clearly established,” requiring lower courts to accept as precedent only cases that have detailed circumstances very similar to the case they are weighing.
“We have repeatedly told courts not to define clearly established law at a high level of generality,” the court wrote in a November 2015 opinion, repeating its language from an earlier ruling. In that 2015 opinion, the justices reversed a lower court decision and granted immunity to Texas State Trooper Chadrin Mullenix, who had stopped a high-speed chase by shooting at a vehicle from an overpass, killing the driver.
Critics of qualified immunity say the high court’s guidance has created a ludicrously narrow standard. Even some judges feel constrained. In a 2018 decision, James Browning, a judge in federal district court in New Mexico, said he was ruling “with reluctance” in favor of an officer who had slammed an unarmed man to the floor in his own home while he was yelling at the police.
The force the cop used, Browning ruled, was excessive. But the officer had to be granted immunity, he said, because of subtle differences with the earlier case Browning had considered as a possible “clearly established” precedent. Those differences included the distance between the men and the officers and what the men were yelling. Even the locations of the respective incidents could be a factor, the judge noted, the earlier case having occurred in a Target parking lot.
In his ruling, Browning criticized the high court’s approach because “a court can almost always manufacture a factual distinction” between the case it is reviewing and an earlier case.
In February, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, Ohio, granted immunity to an officer who shot and wounded a 14-year-old boy in the shoulder after the boy dropped a BB gun and raised his hands. The court rejected as a precedent a 2011 case in which an officer shot and killed a man as he began lowering a shotgun. The difference between the incidents was too great, the court determined, because the boy had first drawn the BB gun from his waistband before dropping it.
In other recent cases, courts have sided with police because of the difference between subduing a woman for walking away from an officer, and subduing a woman for refusing to end a phone call; between shooting at a dog and instead hitting a child, and shooting at a truck and hitting a passenger; and between unleashing a police dog to bite a motionless suspect in a bushy ravine, and unleashing a police dog to bite a compliant suspect in a canal in the woods.
The Supreme Court in 2009 raised the bar even higher for plaintiffs to overcome qualified immunity. In Pearson v. Callahan, it gave judges the option to simply ignore the question of whether a cop used excessive force and instead focus solely on whether the conduct was clearly established as unlawful.
In the decade since then, the Reuters analysis found, appeals courts have increasingly ignored the question of excessive force. In such cases, when the court declines to establish whether police used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, it avoids setting a clearly established precedent for future cases, even for the most egregious acts of police violence. In effect, the same conduct can repeatedly go unpunished.
Plaintiffs in excessive force cases against police have had a harder time getting past qualified immunity since a 2009 Supreme Court decision allowing lower courts to weigh only whether the force used is established in precedent as unlawful.
The case of Khari Illidge shows this perverse dynamic at work.
One cool spring evening in 2013, sheriff’s deputies in Phenix City, Alabama, a suburb of Columbus, Georgia, responded to a trespassing call. They found Illidge wandering along a quiet, tree-lined road. The 25-year-old was naked, covered in scratches and behaving erratically.
In the encounter, the deputies shocked Illidge six times with a stun gun before he fell to the ground. As he lay face-down, one deputy shocked him 13 more times as two others struggled to handcuff his wrists, according to their testimony. They then shackled his ankles with leg irons and fastened them to his handcuffs – an extreme form of restraint, known as a hogtie, that many police departments across the country have banned.
A 385-pound officer then kneeled on Illidge’s upper back until he went limp. Illidge was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The autopsy report lists cardiac arrest as the cause of death.
“They treated him like an animal,” Gladis Callwood, Illidge’s mother, said. “Or maybe even worse.”
Callwood sued the police, alleging excessive force. The cops claimed qualified immunity. They said they did what was necessary to subdue an aggressive man who resisted arrest and who, according to a friend who had seen him earlier, had probably taken LSD. A toxicology report found no traces of the drug in his blood.
“You have to make split-second decisions,” Ray Smith, one of the deputies who had shocked and hogtied Illidge, told Reuters. Hesitation can be deadly, he said.
Judge W. Harold Albritton in federal district court in Montgomery, Alabama, sided with the cops. In his ruling, the judge said there was no precedent establishing that the officers’ treatment of Illidge was unlawful.
The Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed – even though it had heard a case involving hogtying in Florida in 2009. In that earlier case, Donald George Lewis died after West Palm Beach cops hogtied him on the side of the road where they had found him disoriented and stumbling through traffic. But the appeals court in that earlier case granted immunity without addressing whether the force police used was excessive. As a result, the court didn’t establish a precedent that could apply in subsequent cases – including Callwood’s.
By allowing judges to consider only the question of clearly established law in excessive force cases, the Supreme Court created a closed loop in which “the case law gets frozen,” said lawyer Matt Farmer, who represented Lewis’s family.
In October 2018, the Supreme Court declined to review Callwood’s case. Her lawsuit, like Aldaba’s, was dead.
High-profile outliers
Police have difficult, high-risk jobs. Few would dispute that. Qualified immunity is essential, proponents say, because police need latitude to make split-second decisions in situations that could put lives, including their own, at risk.
“It is very easy to second-guess the decision making of a police officer when you are sitting at a desk,” said Chris Balch, an Atlanta-based lawyer who represents police departments in civil rights cases.
Larry James, general counsel of the National Fraternal Order of Police, said the trend in appeals courts to favor immunity reflects the high volume of meritless lawsuits civil rights lawyers file. “Plaintiffs’ lawyers sue everyone under the sun, irrespective of the facts,” he said.
Even so, as the Reuters analysis found, appellate courts have ruled in favor of plaintiffs, denying cops immunity, in 43 percent of cases in recent years. As opponents of qualified immunity point out, denial of immunity doesn’t automatically mean cops will be held liable for alleged excessive force. When such cases go to trial, juries may side with police after weighing the facts of a case. Also, local governments or their insurers, not the cops themselves, typically bear the financial burden of litigation, settlements or jury awards.
The U.S. government does not maintain comprehensive data on civilians killed or seriously injured by police. According to media organizations and police-accountability groups that compile numbers from police reports, news accounts and other sources, the number of deaths alone is about 1,000 a year.
A handful of those incidents draw national attention to police tactics – for example, the 2014 death of Eric Garner after New York City police put him in a lethal chokehold. In such high-profile cases, qualified immunity rarely comes into play. Instead, police departments, often under heavy political pressure and facing public protests, typically offer big dollar settlements to victims or their survivors. The cops may also face disciplinary action or criminal charges.
In the far more numerous incidents of alleged excessive force that don’t make national headlines, police departments are under less pressure to settle, and officers are even less likely to be prosecuted or otherwise disciplined. In those cases, federal civil rights lawsuits provide the obvious avenue for holding cops accountable.
The United States first allowed citizens to sue government officials for civil rights violations in a law passed in 1871. These so-called Section 1983 lawsuits were intended to give citizens a path to justice when state and local authorities in the post-Civil War era turned a blind eye to – or even participated in – acts of racist violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
Nearly a century later, the Supreme Court introduced qualified immunity, articulating the doctrine in a 1967 ruling to limit Section 1983 lawsuits. The court reasoned that police should not face liability for enforcing the law in good faith. The court refined the doctrine in 1982 to include the “clearly established” test.
Today, after decades of Supreme Court tweaks to how excessive force cases are judged, plaintiffs’ lawyers say the deck is unfairly stacked against their clients. “Why are there so many police shootings?” said Dale Galipo, a prominent California civil rights attorney. “I would say one of the reasons is there’s no accountability, there’s no deterrent.”
Several lawyers told Reuters they decline to take cases they think may have merit in large part due to the high barrier of qualified immunity. “I have turned down dozens of police misconduct cases and have routinely referred the potential plaintiffs to qualified immunity as a major problem,” said Victor Glasberg, a civil rights lawyer in Virginia.
The American Association for Justice, the plaintiff bar’s main lobbying group and a backer of efforts to curb qualified immunity, knows that its “members would like to pursue cases where people are treated unjustly,” said Jeffrey White, the group’s senior associate general counsel. But, he added, lawyers must think carefully when “the chances of obtaining justice are tilted heavily towards defendants.”
Gentle and loyal
Johnny Leija spent his life in small towns in the dry, flat farming and oil country on both sides of the Oklahoma-Texas border, quitting school after junior high to take a series of temporary construction jobs.
He was gentle and fiercely loyal to his family, friends and relatives told Reuters. They recounted the time Leija ended up with a broken leg after sticking up for his sister in a fight with her abusive boyfriend. In his early 20s, he spent a year in Marshall County jail for marijuana possession. After that, his family said, he never indulged in anything harder than the occasional Bud Light.
Leija moved to Madill in early 2011 with his girlfriend, Olivia Flores, and the four children they were raising – one of their own and three by Flores from an earlier relationship. He soon got a job welding and painting horse trailers, but money was tight. Leija, Flores and the children were sleeping on the floor of their still-unfurnished house. In late March, when Leija started complaining about pain in his chest and torso, Flores had to pawn a radio to buy medicine.
On the morning of March 24, 2011, after Leija spent most of the night vomiting, he and Flores headed to the emergency room at Integris Marshall County Medical Center, now called AllianceHealth Madill. Details of what happened over the next 12 hours come from a review of hundreds of pages of medical, police and court records and interviews with people involved.
When first examined, Leija was agreeable and alert, but his blood oxygen levels were dangerously low. He was put on oxygen and given antibiotics through an intravenous line. He soon seemed on the mend and was admitted to a room down the hall.
Flores left midafternoon to pick up the children from school. Soon after, Leija’s breathing became labored. His blood-oxygen level plunged again. He became distressed and aggressive. The doctor on call, John Conley, prescribed over the phone an anti-anxiety pill. Leija refused it, claiming that the hospital staff was trying to poison him. “I am Superman,” he yelled. “I am God!”
He somehow cut the IV line and told a nurse that he needed to leave. Conley, again by phone, told nurses to give Leija an injection to calm him. The hospital had no security staff, so a nurse called the police to help restrain Leija for the shot. Conley arrived minutes later, finding Leija in the bathroom still insisting he had to leave the hospital.
Madill Police Officer Brandon Pickens and Marshall County Deputy Sheriffs Steve Atnip and Steve Beebe were eating dinner at La Grande, a Tex-Mex joint on a highway north of Madill, when they got the call about an unruly patient at the hospital.
They had little information when they arrived. Beebe thought Leija, dressed in a white T-shirt and pajama bottoms, was a visitor, not a patient.
According to the officers’ accounts, Leija pulled the gauze from his IV site and yelled, “This is my blood!” as it dripped on the floor.
The officers ordered Leija to his knees. He did not comply. Beebe aimed his Stinger stun gun at Leija and fired, hitting Leija in the chest.
It had little effect. Leija “hollered out, shook a bit,” a nurse later testified. Beebe, Pickens and Atnip then grabbed Leija, 5 foot 8 and 230 pounds, and pushed him against a wall, where Beebe pressed the Stinger against Leija’s back and shocked him again. The four toppled onto the lobby floor with a thud.
Pickens and Atnip were holding Leija face down and Beebe was trying to handcuff him when he grunted and stopped moving. Clear fluid poured from his mouth and pooled on the floor around his head.
Conley and staff spent 40 minutes trying to revive Leija. At 7:29 p.m., he was pronounced dead, a Stinger dart still stuck in his chest.
Marc Harrison, a forensic pathologist with the Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, testified in a sworn deposition that Leija’s manner of death was “natural,” but that “it would be reasonable to assume” that two shocks with a stun gun and Leija’s physical struggle with police would have “required an elevated need for oxygen.” Through the medical examiner’s office, Harrison said he stands by his opinion.
Stern denials
When Aldaba’s lawsuit against the officers landed in federal court in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the officers’ lawyers quickly asked that the case be thrown out on the grounds of qualified immunity.
It was “abundantly clear” that the force used on Leija was not excessive, the police lawyers argued. Further, they said, no established precedent put the officers on notice that they would violate Leija’s rights “by attempting to subdue an individual so that medical staff could properly treat him.”
Judge Frank Seay disagreed. He noted that officers’ accounts differed from each other about the extent of the threat Leija posed and what the officers knew about his medical condition. For instance, the two sheriff deputies said Leija was “slinging blood” and had challenged them to fight, but officer Pickens did not make those claims. And while all three officers said Leija was bleeding heavily, two nurses present testified that he wasn’t.
“Leija was a hospital patient. He was not armed in any fashion. While it is alleged that he was using his blood as a weapon, there is no evidence that any blood spattered on any of the officers,” Seay said in his April 5, 2013, ruling. The case against the three officers could now move forward.
Beebe, the deputy who twice shocked Leija, said in an interview that his biggest regret about the fatal encounter was not having more details on Leija and his medical condition. “Maybe we could have done things different if we had that information,” Beebe said. “The last thing you want to do is end up with somebody dying.” He added: “I’m sad for the family. We all live in the same community.”
Beebe also serves as pastor at a Southern Baptist church in a nearby town – a role that he said has helped him understand the need to de-escalate stressful situations.
In the encounter with Leija, however, he and the other officers “did the right thing” to protect themselves and the people in the hospital, he said. “I think we need to be held accountable,” Beebe said. “But when we go out, sometimes we have to use force…We shouldn’t have to worry about being sued every time.”
Pickens, now a firefighter in Madill, directed questions to his police superiors. City Manager James Fullingim, who was police chief at the time of Leija’s death, said immunity is important for officers to perform their jobs. “The officers absolutely did not do anything wrong,” he said.
Atnip died in a motorcycle accident in 2015. Conley, the doctor who treated Leija, declined to comment.
The police took their case to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado. That court was no less stern in denying the officers’ appeal, faulting their decision to “Tase and wrestle to the ground a hospital patient whose mental disturbance was the result of his serious and deteriorating medical condition.” Leija did not commit any crime, the court said, and he posed a threat only to himself, passively resisting the officers. “The situation the police officers faced in this case called for conflict resolution and de-escalation, not confrontation and Tasers,” the court said.
The officers then petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. Their appeal arrived just as the justices were weighing the case of Texas State Trooper Mullenix, the cop who shot and killed a fleeing driver from an overpass.
The lower courts had denied Mullenix immunity, saying it was unclear how much of a risk the driver had posed. But on Nov. 9, 2015, the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts. Ignoring whether the force used was illegal, the justices focused on whether Mullenix’s actions had been clearly established as illegal. It concluded that none of the three car-chase cases it had previously decided were similar enough.
The same day, the justices ordered the 10th Circuit to use the Mullenix ruling as a guide in reconsidering whether qualified immunity should apply in Aldaba’s case.
Aldaba’s lawyer, Jeremy Beaver, pointed out to the appellate panel a handful of “strikingly similar” rulings from the 10th Circuit going back nearly 20 years that provided “ample warning” to the police that their actions were unlawful.
Case law since 2001, Beaver noted, required police to consider a person’s diminished mental health or capacity when determining what force to use. A 2007 case denounced the beating and Tasing of an unarmed, nonviolent person who was not fleeing. So did a similar case from 2010.
“Mr. Leija had a clearly established right to be free from Tasering and tackling while he was a hospital patient who had committed no crimes, was unarmed, was not a threat to the officers or the public, and was mentally and physically compromised,” Beaver argued in court papers.
That wasn’t enough. The revised appeals court decision, written by Judge Gregory Phillips, dismissed Beaver’s arguments because the “offered cases differ too much from this one.”
Phillips said the cases Beaver cited involved force to detain people for “non-medical” reasons and did not involve hospital personnel “standing by observing” the incident. “We have found no case presenting a similar situation,” the judge wrote. Phillips did not respond to a request for comment.
The outcome, Beaver said, highlights the painful paradox of qualified immunity. Aldaba “had to live with the fact that at every stage, every judge that reviewed the case determined that there were constitutional violations that had occurred,” he said. “Despite that, she still couldn’t have a trial.”
By Andrew Chung in Madill, Oklahoma; Lawrence Hurley in Washington, D.C.; Jackie Botts in Los Angeles; and Andrea Januta and Guillermo Gomez in New York

The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements is a non-fiction book authored by American philosopher Eric Hoffer. Published in 1951, it depicts a variety of arguments in terms of applied world history and social psychology to explain why mass movements arise to challenge to status quo, Hoffer discussing the sense of individual identity and the holding to particular ideals that can lead to fanaticism among both leaders and followers
Part 1 – The Appeal of Mass Movements
Hoffer says that mass movements begin when discontented, frustrated, powerless people lose faith in existing institutions and demand change. Feeling hopeless, such people participate in movements that allow them to become part of a larger collective. They become true believers in a mass movement that “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” (p. 12)
Put another way, Hoffer says: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the loss of faith in ourselves.” (p. 14) Leaders inspire these movements, but the seeds of mass movements must already exist for the leaders to be successful. And while mass movements typically blend nationalist, political and religious ideas, they all compete for angry and/or marginalized people.
Part 2 – The Potential Converts
The destitute are not usually converts to mass movements; they are too busy trying to survive to become engaged. But what Hoffer calls the “new poor,” those who previously had wealth or status but who believe they have now lost it, are potential converts. Such people are resentful and blame others for their problems.
Mass movements also attract the partially assimilated—those who feel alienated from mainstream culture. Others include misfits, outcasts, adolescents, and sinners, as well as the ambitious, selfish, impotent and bored. What all converts all share is the feeling that their lives are meaningless and worthless.
A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole. (p. 41)
Hoffer emphasizes that creative people—those who experience creative flow—aren’t usually attracted to mass movements. Creativity provides inner joy which both acts as an antidote to the frustrations with external hardships. Creativity also relieves boredom, a major cause of mass movements:
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and
support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored still should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses. (pp. 51-52)
Part 3 – United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Mass movements demand of their followers a “total surrender of a distinct self.” (p. 117) Thus a follower identifies as “a member of a certain tribe or family.” (p. 62) Furthermore, mass movements denigrate and “loathe the present.” (p. 74) By regarding the modern world as worthless, the movement inspires a battle against it.
What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as the decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so. Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance. There must be something more—and there is. By expiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation … (p. 75)
Mass movements also promote faith over reason and serve as “fact-proof screens between the faithful and the realities of the world.” (p. 79)
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude … presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine … simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. (pp. 80-81).
So believers ignore truths that contradict their fervent beliefs, but this hides the fact that,
The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual sources … but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. The passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the sources of all virtue and strength … He sacrifices his life to prove his worth … The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to reason or his moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. (p. 85).
Thus the doctrines of the mass movement must not be questioned—they are regarded with certitude—and they are spread through “persuasion, coercion, and proselytization.” Persuasion works best on those already sympathetic to the doctrines, but it must be vague enough to allow “the frustrated to … hear the echo of their own musings in … impassioned double talk.” (p. 106) Hoffer quotes Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “a sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective.” (p. 106) The urge to proselytize comes not from a deeply held belief in the truth of doctrine but from an urge of the fanatic to “strengthen his own faith by converting others.” (p. 110)
Moreover, mass movements need an object of hate which unifies believers, and “the ideal devil is a foreigner.” (p. 93) Mass movements need a devil. But in reality, the “hatred of a true believer is actually a disguised self-loathing …” and “the fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure.” (p. 85) Through their fanatical action and personal sacrifice, the fanatic tries to give their life meaning.
Part 4 – Beginning and End
Hoffer states that three personality types typically lead mass movements: “men of words”, “fanatics”, and “practical men of action.” Men of words try to “discredit the prevailing creeds” and create a “hunger for faith” which is then fed by “doctrines and slogans of the new faith.” (p. 140) (In the USA think of the late William F. Buckley.) Slowly followers emerge.
Then fanatics take over. (In the USA think of the Koch brothers, Murdoch, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Alex Jones, etc.) Fanatics don’t find solace in literature, philosophy or art. Instead, they are characterized by viciousness, the urge to destroy, and the perpetual struggle for power. But after mass movements transform the social order, the insecurity of their followers is not ameliorated. At this point, the “practical men of action” take over and try to lead the new order by further controlling their followers. (Think Steve Bannon, Mitch McConnell, Steve Miller, Donald Trump, etc.)
In the end mass movements that succeed often bring about a social order worse than the previous one. (This was one of Will Durant’s findings in The Lessons of History.) As Hoffer puts it near the end of his work: “All mass movements … irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.” (p. 141)