Jamal Khashoggi, image Wikipedia.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Seven years later, Donald Trump received Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the man U.S. intelligence concluded ordered Khashoggi’s killing—with open arms in the Oval Office. When ABC News journalist Mary Bruce asks him directly about that finding, Trump shrugs: “Things happen.”

Things happen. Journalists get slain and dismembered. Academics get imprisoned. Activists get tortured. Dissidents disappear. Independent media bows down. Judges kneel.

Political violence, the erosion of free speech, the end of democracy… Things happen.

In the words of the late psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton, this points to “malignant normality.” The process by which destructive ideologies, violent policies, and dehumanizing practices become embedded in everyday life—routinized, accepted, even perceived as normal. And in that normalization, evil not only persists but spreads.

According to PEN........

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