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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
I have been seeing report after report of Israel’s genocidal actions and policies under criminally indicted Benjamin Netanyahu and his fascist cohorts, but there has been so much disaster occurring in the United States, that I haven’t posted anything about Israel and what the Jews are doing in a while. But now I must, because of the just released UN Report. In the beginning, I found it so hard to believe that the Jews who, as a people and a religion, just a few decades earlier would themselves carry out a brutal genocidal attack, would do much the same to Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel exists and was created because of the guilt the Christian West, including the United States, felt after 6 million Jews were murdered under Hitler’s reign, many of their bodies burned in ovens, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish women repeatedly raped. How could a nation of Jews turn around and, themselves, mimic and carry out such crimes against humanity? And yet, as the United Nations has just reported, and this CBS News article recounts, that is exactly what is going on. I want to be clear here, I do not in any way defend the activities of HAMAS and the Palestinian terrorists. But one cannot get past the obliteration of Gaza from constant Israeli bombing, particularly of hospitals and refugee centers, and the fact that nearly 70% of the deaths in Gaza and on the West Bank are Palestinian women and children, at least 43,000 by October 2024.
Israeli soldiers are seen in the city of Tulkarem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, during a raid, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Wahaj Bani Moufleh / Middle East Images / AFP / Getty
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — A United Nations report published Thursday accuses Israeli military forces of engaging in “sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians” in the war-torn Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank since Hamas’ terror attacks against Israel on October 7th, 2023. The U.N. Human Rights Council’s report also claims Israel’s troops have committed “genocidal acts” in the war against Hamas, which was sparked by the U.S. and Israeli designated terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
In making the latter claim, the council cited what it called the “systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities” including maternity wards and Gaza’s primary in-vitro fertility clinic.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement shared by his office, quickly and angrily refuted the report and attacked the council as an “anti-Semitic, rotten, terrorist-supporting and irrelevant body.”
A reader wrote me today asking, “Why do you keep calling our President a psychopath? On what basis do you say that?” Well, here is the answer, based entirely on the evidence of medical science.
Trump Police Mug Shot which is posted in the entrance to the Oval Office in the White House
Psychopaths often engage in criminal, cruel, or socially irresponsible behavior, including lying, stealing, or being violent or abusive toward others. Because psychopaths have no empathy for a person’s needs or rights, they also feel no remorse—even when their actions harm others. These combined traits and deficits mean that psychopaths are likely to engage in crime, violence, abusive behavior, and additional forms of cruel or dangerous behaviors. 1,3,5,7
The term psychopath connotes a vivid image of a person who lacks empathy and is likely to engage in aggressive or violent behavior towards others. Psychopathy is not a clinical diagnosis, but does share many traits with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), a serious and chronic personality disorder. It has been hypothesized that psychopathy is an extreme version of ASPD, but there are key differences in their presentation.4 Sociopaths and psychopaths both lack empathy and concern for others, but psychopaths are more likely to engage in violence without thought about its consequences or the harm it brings others. 1,3,5
20 Signs of a Psychopath
Many psychopathic people are pathological liars and […]
As many, perhaps most of you, know I live mostly in the world of research and science as an experimentalist. Many of my friends and colleagues come from that world and today, in addition to the letter from the woman about why I call Trump a psychopath, I heard from a researcher at John Hopkins University who has just been told his federal medical research grant has been cut off. Censuring scientists is straight out of the fascist playbook, and we are seeing it happening at universities, colleges, and federal science agencies across the United States. This puts your life and the lives of your friends and family at risk in many ways. It will also change the stature of the United States in the world, largely to the benefit of China.
Linda McMahon, a billionaire with no educational credentials at all testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Hearing to examine her nomination to be Secretary of Education at the Dirkesn Senate Office Building on February 13, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Credit Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post / Getty
“If the government can do this to universities, we don’t live in a free society. Five alarm fire,” wrote one professor.
Amid a week of scrutiny from the Trump administration on higher education, the U.S. Department of Education announced Friday that it has opened investigations into dozens of universities for “allegedly engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.” The department is also probing whether six universities awarded “impermissible race-based scholarships.”
The investigations are part of the administration’s widercrackdown on so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and initiatives, and comes as the Trump administration is also taking aim at universities with the purported goal of rooting out antisemitism on college campuses.
The newly announced investigations from Department of […]
Another page from the fascist playbook is to scare journalists, newspapers and television channels from accurately reporting what the fascist administration is actually doing. And we are now deep into that. With a few exceptions — Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow come immediately to mind — what stands out for me as I search each day for fact-based reports on how the United States, its democracy and economy are being taken apart by psychopath Trump, his Frankenstein Musk — who bought him his office — and the Republican flying monkeys in Congress, is how hard real journalism is to find these days.
Credit: Adobe
President Donald Trump ripped the media on Friday, as is typical, but he went a step further by calling the press’s coverage of the justice system “totally illegal.”
Trump spoke at the Department of Justice, where he rehashed many of his old grievances, including the criminal cases against him that have since been dropped. The president praised Judge Aileen Cannon for tossing the classified documents case against him. Another federal case, involving Trump’s attempt to overturn the election that year, was dropped after Trump was elected. According to DOJ policy, sitting presidents cannot be federally prosecuted. He then went on a digression about former basketball coach Bobby Knight, who famously went ballistic on referees.
“Bobby Knight would play the ref,” Trump said. “He would play the ref. He’d scream at the ref. He would scream so hard. Oh boy, it was terrible, actually. And the people would come up, his assistant coaches would come up, ‘Coach don’t do that.’”
He then turned his ire toward several news outlets, including the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which has been critical of his […]
Maybe this is getting covered on your local media, but I don’t see much discussion in the national media (this came from A British newspaper). It is, of course, yet another manifestation of the changing climate. Anyway if these storms are headed your way, prepare. This is all just going to get worse and worse.
Firefighters battle a wildfire in Oklahoma City, on Friday. High winds have fanned wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma. Credit: Nick Oxford / Reuters
The National Weather Service has predicted extreme weather across a vast swath of the US encompassing more than 100 million people, with powerful winds gusts up to 80mph (130km/h) being forecast from the border with Canada to Texas.
A sprawling storm system crossing the US on Friday overturned semitrucks on highways and fanned wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma, where officials called for evacuations in at least one town. Tornado threats loomed for the Mississippi valley into the night and the deep south on Saturday.
An approaching wildfire fueled by dry grasses and spread by strong winds prompted emergency officials to urge residents to evacuate Leedey, Oklahoma, a town of about 400 people. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma state patrol said on the social platform X that dusty winds toppled several tractor-trailers.
“This is terrible out here,” Charles Daniel, a truck driver hauling a 48ft trailer along Interstate 40 in western Oklahoma, said of the high winds whipping up dust. “There’s a lot of […]
Antonio Pequeño IV, Staff Writer - Forbes Magazine
Stephan:
In the fascist coup Trump is trying to carry out, Elon Musk is his Joseph Goebbels. The analogy is more accurate than most of the media seems to understand. Musk is a South African immigrant who was a supporter of apartheid and who has with increasing openness, as he works for Trump to make the United States a fascist state, proclaimed his neo-Nazism.
Neo-Nazi Elon Musk gives the Sieg Heilsalute Credit: The Guardian
Tesla chief and presidential adviser Elon Musk shared a post Thursday that said public sector workers, not Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, murdered millions of people, marking the billionaire’s latest Nazi-related post as he and his electric vehicle company face continued backlash and boycotts as critics say his embrace of right-wing politics is veering more extreme.
Musk, who has over 219 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, retweeted a post saying Soviet revolutionary Joseph Stalin, former Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong and Hitler—whose regime under his direction orchestrated the Holocaust—did not murder millions of people, “Their public sector workers did.”
The post had 1 million views and 14,000 likes as of Thursday evening.
Musk’s repost comes as Tesla is facing boycotts around the world that has resulted in calls for Tesla owners to sell their vehicles and posters in the Bay Area urging owners to “sell your swasticar.”
Irie Sentner and Josh Gerstein, Staff Writers - Politico
Stephan:
Trump is a fascist, and today he went to the Department of Justice he has gutted and turned into his personal law firm and told us it was going to be used by him to get revenge on those who oppose him, and to end freedom of the press so the media will stop saying negative things about him and what he and his fascist DOGE and Congressional helpers are doing to dismantle America’s democracy, and turn it into an authoritarian fascist state like Hungary. I urge my readers to get out and join any of the many demonstrations against this coup that are going on around the country. No one is going to stop what is happening but the people of the United States.
President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour.
While condemning officials who directed the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and repeating his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, Trump said: “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”
In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”
It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused […]
Your country is being taken away from you, I hope every American realizes that. It is happening because a small majority of us voted for it. After all, all of what is taking place day-by-day was completely spelled out in Project 2025. Aspiring dictator Trump doesn’t like opposition so he has his flying monkeys trying to make it a crime for Americans to exercise their rights and publicly protest what is being done to the United States.
Troy Edgar testifies during his confirmation hearing for deputy homeland security secretary on February 25, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem briefly attended the confirmation hearing. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
“This is one of the most chilling things I’ve heard a senior U.S. official say.”
In an interview with one of the top officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday, NPR‘s Michel Martin sought to gain clarity about the agency’s reasoning for arresting former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil last week—but Troy Edgar provided no supporting evidence of specific offenses committed by Khalil, who has not been charged with a crime, and suggested his mere participation in “pro-Palestinian activity” was sufficient to order his deportation.
Edgar, the deputy homeland security secretary, repeatedly alleged that Khalil was in the U.S. on a visa, despite Martin correcting him and clarifying that the Algerian citizen is a legal permanent resident of the country with a green card—until it was reportedly revoked under the Trump administration’s “catch and […]
