Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, posted this message on his Substack blog. Having watched Trump apologists on TV today, explaining why it was just to kill Alex Pretti, it was refreshing to encounter simple truths: the murderers running our government, especially the Department of Himeland Security, have no souls.

Their first instinct is to lie.

Anyone who watched the videos saw that Alex had a cellphone in one hand and the other hand was empty. Everyone knows by now that Alex had a registered gun that he never drew, and that was removed by an Ice agent before he was slaughtered. Everyone could see that he advanced to help a woman throw to the ground by ICE and that he never posed a threat to ICE agents.

Krugman wrote:

I was working on another wonkish post about China’s trade surplus when the news about Alex Pretti’s murder broke. I’ll put that post up at some point, but not today.

It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters. It has been equally obvious that ICE and the Border Patrol are now filled with sadistic thugs. Yet many people — almost the entire GOP, everyone serving in the Trump administration, some Democrats, a significant part of the media — were too cowardly to admit the obvious.

At this point, however, there are no more excuses. In a way the cowards and opportunists enabling Trump are more to blame for where we are than Trump and company themselves: monsters are monsters and can’t help themselves, but the enablers have a choice. And they have chosen, again and again, to accommodate and facilitate evil.

I wish I could believe that the last few weeks will be the last straw, but I don’t. To be honest, I wish I believed in Hell, because if it did exist, the enablers would be going there along with the monsters.

What I do believe in is the courage and decency of millions of ordinary Americans, which have been so dramatically on display in Minneapolis. We can only hope that this courage and decency get us through this nightmare — and we must do all we can to make it happen.