No matter what progressive words he wishes to say, this is 'the tell.'
“Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead