Sympathy for Our Devils

One of my editorial cartoonist colleagues got arrested for child pornography (or CSAM, for “child sexual abuse material” as it is also called) this week. As I write this, he is in jail, apparently unable to make bail, awaiting arraignment.

I won’t get into the details of his case, or at least the details we have so far, here. It is, as these things go, a novel set of allegations. I may write about those aspects of the situation in the future.

He has had an exceptionally rewarding life and career. First Black cartoonist to win the Pulitzer in cartooning. Creator of a widely-syndicated and highly-respected comic strip. Author of a bestselling graphic novel. Husband and father of four.

All of that is starting to fall apart. His employers have issued statements distancing themselves from him even as they note that, legally at least, Americans are presumed innocent until proven guilty. It isn’t difficult to predict what will happen next. His life as he knew it before the police arrived at his home bearing a search warrant has come to an end. It is highly unlikely that he will ever be paid to draw cartoons again or, for that matter, to do anything at all. At this point, his best-case scenario is that he doesn’t lose his family, makes bail so he can fight his case and is found not guilty or manages to negotiate a shorter-than-usual prison sentence.

Because you might wonder: we were not friends. Either of us could have called the other with reasonable certainty that the call would be returned. And we did. We talked about business stuff once or twice. We talked at a recent cartooning convention after he delivered a talk about his work.

He has not been charged with physically harming any children. In our culture, however, there is no worse offense to be accused of than anything that relates to pedophilia or child pornography. In prison, those convicted of “child molestation” are targeted for violence by inmates who have committed what they deem to be less serious offenses, like murder. He is in the worst kind of trouble.

It is completely understandable that we have contempt for those who violate and rape children, the most vulnerable members of society. Kids should be protected and cared for, not victimized. Survivors of childhood sexual (and other) trauma carry their wounds around with them the rest of their lives.

Reflecting our desire to protect children, lawmakers have instituted harsh penalties for those who are found guilty of crimes like those of which my colleague stands accused. For first offenders found guilty of CSAM possession, 99% go to prison; the average sentence is eight years. The House of Representatives is about to consider legislation, reportedly supported by President-Elect Donald Trump, that would impose either the death penalty or a mandatory life sentence.

By all accounts, however, harsh sentencing is not having the desired deterrent effect. “Last year, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused—more than double what they found the previous year,” The New York Times reported in 2019. “Twenty years ago, the online images were a problem; 10 years ago, an epidemic. Now, the crisis is at a breaking point… Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this: Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year.” CSAM had become even more widespread by 2023. AI “deep fake” CSAM, at least some of which is “trained” by scraping the real thing, has exploded all over the Internet.

Perhaps it’s time to start thinking of men (who account for over 99% of those charged with possessing CSAM) who seek out this material not as monsters, but as people desperately in need of help. As Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Johns Hopkins Sex and Gender Clinic, told the Times: “People don’t choose what arouses them—they discover it. No one grows up wanting to be a pedophile.”

We used to think that victims of what we used to call child molestation tended to become molesters themselves. It happens, but not as much as experts formerly believed. Now the growing scientific consensus is that pedophiles are born that way. “The biological clues attached to pedophilia demonstrate that its roots are prenatal,” James Cantor, director of the Toronto Sexuality Center, said. “These are not genetic; they can be traced to specific periods of development in the womb.” It’s hard-wiring. Unlike other people, many pedophiles’ sexual attraction to young people remains frozen in time from when they too are young, rather than aging along with them.

None of this is to imply that people who consume CSAM are not a threat to flesh-and-blood children. They are. Roughly half of prisoners convicted of CSAM eventually admit that they assaulted at least one kid. And the recidivism rate for sexual offenders is high.

Though it is tempting to say that dangerous people should be locked up or even killed, where is our compassion for the fact that they are themselves victims, of a psychological disorder? That they’re trying to fight off strong sexual urges that they never chose? That it’s almost impossible for them to get the help they need? State of mind of the accused is, or should be, front and center when evaluating whether someone has a criminal mindset and deserves imprisonment or suffers from a disorder that causes urges that could be effectively treated by psychotherapy and/or psychotropic and other drugs.

If you can’t summon sympathy, try focusing on the fact that our current approach is failing miserably.

One reason we’re losing the fight is that the problem is so vast. One out of six men told a 2023 Australian study that they were sexually attracted to children under age 18. Aside from CSAM, “mainstream” media including advertising and social media increasingly sexualizes children at ever-younger ages. For every guy like my colleague, whose life we destroy and toss into prison at taxpayer expense, there are countless more to replace him and countless more disgusting images online and countless more young victims being exploited to provide them.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

TMI Show Ep 59: “The Very Strange Romanian Election That Wasn’t”

Live at 10 am Eastern time today and streaming 24-7 thereafter:

Calin Georgescu, a right-wing politician from the right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) Party, won the first round of Romania’s presidential election on November 24. Shocked by the results, pro-NATO and pro-EU officials in Romania claimed that Georgescu had been boosted by TikTok and Russia, both of whom denied interfering.

Romania’s highest court annulled the results and ordered the government to rerun the election in its entirety. Georgescu denounced the vote cancellation as a “formalized coup d’etat.” The first round of the replacement election is now scheduled for May 4.

Dr. George Szamuely, senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute, joins “The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan to analyze this strange geopolitical turn in the heart of Europe.

TMI Show Ep 58: “Biden’s Farewell + Gaza Ceasefire”

Echoing President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of a “military industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address, President Joe Biden brought his decades-long career in politics to an end by warning of “an oligarchy [that] is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom.”

Indeed, income and wealth inequality have exploded to levels similar to those that preceded the 1789 French Revolution. “The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask: what can or should be done to make American society and economics more equal?

Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal in the Gaza War that could send three dozen Israeli hostages home and give starving and homeless Palestinians a reprieve from more than a year of genocidal violence and wind down a 15-month war that helped destroy Biden’s presidency.

Streams live Monday-Friday 10 am Eastern time. You can watch anytime thereafter.

TMI Show Ep 57: “North Korea Has Entered the Chat”

The Russo-Ukrainian War has entered a new phase, in which Ukraine’s Western allies are finally acknowledging that Russia, which controls 35% of Ukrainian territory, is prevailing and will likely win in the end. Trump has signaled that the blank check of weapons and money to Kyiv is about to expire and that he wants a peace deal. Putin has responded that Russia is ready to negotiate. Zelensky says he’s willing to talk. So, will peace talks actually happen? If so, how are they likely to conclude?

A side show to the conflict has been Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk Region of Russia. Russian and allied North Korean forces have encircled the Ukrainians occupying Russia, and Ukraine has made much of the North Korean presence, though it’s not clear what their point is.

“The TMI Show”’s Ted Rall and Manila Chan check in with Mark Sleboda, international relations and security analyst, on the state of the Ukraine War.

TMI Show Ep 56: “Cultural Sensitivity for Marginalized Groups and Persons”

Everyone needs access to high-quality health services, but health inequities persist. Societal attitudes among healthcare workers, advocates say, foster stigma and discrimination that discourage patients from seeking help.

Enter the “woke brigade.” In an effort to provide “culturally and linguistically-appropriate proficient health care delivery for our nation’s increasingly diverse population,” doctors, nurses and others are being trained in Cultural Sensitivity classes to use more better words.

Are Cultural Sensitivity programs effective or, as some studies have shown, can they be counterproductive and even create a hostile work environment? Are they actually a distraction from the real causes of unequal access to healthcare: poverty and health-insurance companies that routinely deny claims?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan have exclusively obtained documents from a Cultural Sensitivity program now in widespread use in a US hospital system. Join us as we explore the role of language training in a medical workplace.

TMI Show Ep 55: “CEOs in the Crosshairs”

Rather than be followed by the expressions of sympathy and shock one might usually expect, the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York was also greeted with ridicule and even approval by a substantial portion of the public. Worried that copycat killers might take that response as a cue to replicate the alleged actions of accused shooter Luigi Mangione, CEOs and their companies are reconsidering their security measures.

With the Inauguration days away, how does this inform the security landscape for that high-profile event? Are CEOs paranoid or are they really at increased risk now? What can they and ordinary people worried about their personal security do to make themselves safer?

Ted Rall and Manila Chan ask these questions to security expert Mark Ledlow, a former US Marine and founder of Ledlow Security.

DMZ America Podcast Ep 188: Ann Telnaes Quits Washington Post

Free speech is in the news! Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss the high-profile departure of their colleague, Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, from The Washington Post. Meta and Facebook are getting rid of their fact checkers. And TikTok is begging the Supreme Court for its life.


Joe Biden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

            For journalists, this is the first of two occasions to discuss and evaluate the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. The second will arrive sooner rather than later, when the president dies. Long after we follow him to the grave, historians with the benefit of declassified archives and looser-lipped eyewitnesses will take their own measures of the man and his political career. So away we go with a look at…

            The Good…

            At the end of Trump’s first term, the country’s infrastructure was in woeful condition. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual report on the roads, water, waste treatment and schools we rely on gave it a grade “D.” 43% of roads were in miserable condition. We ranked at the bottom of the G20 most-developed economies in terms of infrastructure spending.

            The 2021 ASCE report said the U.S. needed to spend $5.9 trillion on infrastructure, $3.4 trillion of which was funded. The remaining funding gap was $2.5 trillion.

            Biden’s 2021infrastructure spending bill was the biggest and most ambitious attempt in decades to redress neglect by both Democratic and Republican presidents in the form of “deferred maintenance” and to maybe even build more. Republicans had long signaled that they were open to a bipartisan spending package. But when Biden asked for $4 trillion, they chopped it to bits. By the time he signed it into law in November 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided for just $1.2 trillion.

            Still, it was impressive. Monies authorized by this legislation will replace out-of-date infrastructure, fund new projects and renovate airports and freight rail and the electrical grid and countless other categories for years to come. Ten and fifteen and twenty years from now, you’ll charge your vehicle at a facility that otherwise might not have existed and drive across a bridge that doesn’t collapse because Biden spent his political capital on pushing this bill, the outgoing president’s signature achievement, through Congress.

            …The Bad…

            Throughout Biden’s first year in office, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Russia would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, the anti-Russian military alliance whose members pledge to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Putin’s warning was hardly surprising; how would the U.S. have responded to Mexico or Canada joining an anti-U.S. military alliance like the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, creating a tense border for hundreds of miles? The U.S. invaded tiny Grenada over far less. And Russia had history to consider: when Nazi Germany invaded Russia during World War II, leaving 27 million Soviet citizens dead in their wake, they came in via Ukraine—and the Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators and eagerly participated in the Holocaust.

            Gambling that Putin was bluffing, Ukraine and its Western allies told Putin to go to hell. Months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

            Three years later, despite spending a quarter of a billion dollars on advanced weapons, many of which vanished into the country’s bottomless pit of corruption, Ukraine is losing.

            Ukraine’s ex-actor president, Volodymyr Zelensky, played Biden for a fool. Biden assured Americans that our support for Ukraine was in defense of democracy. Ukraine then banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents, censored the media, banned cable news channels that didn’t toe the line and canceled presidential and parliamentary elections indefinitely. We’ve gone to the mat for the dictator of an authoritarian kleptocracy with a serious neo-Nazi problem, and lost.

            As if one poor choice of foreign bedmates wasn’t enough, Biden pulled the extreme-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even closer following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 raid from Gaza. Like Zelensky, Bibi cashed the blank check from Biden like a drunk gambler on a bender, gleefully engaging in a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that has killed at least 200,000 innocent Gazans and been officially declared genocide by international bodies and revered human-rights organizations.

            Before he dropped out of the presidential race, Biden’s immoral stance in favor of Israel’s bloodthirsty leaders had already hobbled his chances and alienated his party’s progressive base, which was disgusted by the carnage. Kamala Harris, his anointed successor and who echoed his unconditional support for the IDF, inherited this liability. Still worse from a historical vantagepoint, Biden’s branding as a good, decent man, wound up in the toilet.  

            Oh, and Biden didn’t try to increase the minimum wage or create the socialized healthcare system we need and want.

…and The Ugly

You probably know what I’m going to say, but here goes anyway.

Following his disastrous LBJ-style withdrawal from the race, some Democrats now allow that the 82-year-old Biden ought to have kept his implicit promise to serve a single term, to be “a bridge, not as anything else.”

They’re half-right.

As has now been undeniably established from the testimony of the staff who knew him best and as ordinary Americans experienced with dementia could plainly see from the beginning, Biden’s mental deficiencies did not begin with his catastrophic debate performance in 2024. He had “good days and bad days” back in 2020. He ought not have run in the first place.

Vain and self-deluded, and clearly not as sharp as he needed to be to make such a decision, Biden and his DNC handler-allies somehow convinced themselves that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump in 2020. That was almost certainly untrue. There are credible cases to be made that any number of other of his primary rivals, beginning with Bernie Sanders, could have taken out The Donald.

Even if Biden’s only-I-can-beat-him calculus could be proven to have been accurate, however, the nation, the Democratic Party and Biden himself have paid an awful price for his hubris.

There is now no denying that all the “Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes were true. White House officials and staffers, and the Washington press corps, were “hidin’ Biden” for four years in one of the most breathtaking and long-running scams ever undertaken in U.S. politics. They ran a stuffed corpse for president, got it elected, pretended it was running the government, and then, incredibly, tried to pull it off a second time. The Democratic Party, which branded itself the anti-Trump party of democracy and fair elections, pulled off a coup d’état; after they relentlessly attacked Trump for serial lying, it turns out that they were even worse. They stand exposed and ridiculous.

And what was the point? Despite all their efforts, including weaponizing the judicial system against him, Trump won anyway. Now the Democrats are weak and discredited, setting up Trump to be more dangerous than he would otherwise have been.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

TMI Show Ep 54: “City of Angels or Hell on Earth?”

Like many Americans, TMI Show co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan have deep ties to Los Angeles. Manila grew up in metro LA and still considers herself a Californian. Ted was a talk show host at KFI AM 640 Los Angeles and the staff cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times. Join Manila and Ted as they discuss the long-term repercussions of the wildfires that continue to scorch the nation’s biggest city.

As the drought continues and the climate continues to change in a place that never had many water resources to begin with, can we adapt, or is it time to consider forcible population shifts away from California? Should the federal government assist Californians who lose multi-million dollar homes but can’t get insurance? How do we define a tipping point after which a place is no longer suitable for human habitation?

We are joined by Dr. Reese Halter, a conservation biologist and the author, most recently, of the book “Generation Z Emergency.”

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