When individuals lose confidence in traditional arbiters of fact (such as courts, federal agencies, and independent journalism) they naturally retreat into closed information ecosystems that validate their pre-existing worldview.
This is an erosion of the infrastructure of trust. And its do quick degrade, but takes ages to build back up. And election cycles are not long enough to reforge that trust.
Great article, and it sits uneasy (uneasily?) with me.
i found the documentary “the brainwashing of my dad” to be helpful understanding trump as well. sadly my own dad became brainwashed watching fox. he was once smart man, but now he sounds like a raving paranoid lunatic.
There is a profound need for identity. In 1990, a state—the GDR—vanished; and with it disappeared a distinct way of life, specific values, the entire industrial sector, the currency, newspapers, television stations, the government—quite simply, everything. What remained were people who had lived for 41 years on the wrong side of the border, and on the wrong side of history. Today, the far-right party AfD enjoys its greatest successes in the territory of the former GDR.
Thank you! That's a great read. I really do hope that you are right that the patience of facts will outlast the cult of repetition. I suspect that it will be a long slow climb for many people.
Regarding your expert’s opinion on the Goldwater rule:
““The incoherence is worrisome, possibly dangerous,” said Allen Dyer, a retired psychiatrist and retired George Washington University professor who recommends a full battery of tests…. Dyer, in 1973, helped craft the so-called “Goldwater rule” that he says has been misinterpreted to mean that mental health professionals should never offer their analyses of political figures.
Indeed, Dyer repeatedly emphasized to me that “the Goldwater rule” was intended to be an affirmative obligation to educate society regarding mental health issues that may surround a public figure, without diagnosing—which, as stated above, is impossible, as tempting as it may be to do so. The article cites how twenty mental health experts wrote to the White House physician, calling on him to act on the dangers and to respond to: “the explicit concerns on the part of 36 renowned medical experts and mental health professionals, now entered into the Congressional Record.” What is different this time is that this latter group includes recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, for contributing to reducing nuclear dangers, and former chairs who have held some of the highest leadership positions in the field.”
When your neural synapses develop in a home where your experienced reality does not match what you are hearing, then that becomes what you know and find most comforting.
With all the latest neuroscience we have learned why are we not using that information to create more meaningful lives for ourselves???
“Limbic attachment refers to the neurological and emotional bonding between individuals, heavily mediated by the limbic system—the brain's emotional center.
Early-life attachment experiences physically wire the brain's neural pathways, shaping lifelong patterns of emotional regulation, stress response, and social functioning.
Core Brain Structures InvolvedAmygdala: Processes emotional reactivity and fear detection. Secure attachments help regulate this area, preventing it from becoming hyper-reactive.
Hippocampus: Encodes emotional memories. It helps the brain contextualize safety versus threat based on past relational experiences.
Prefrontal Cortex (PFC): Governs executive functions and self-regulation. Strong pathways connect the PFC to the limbic system, allowing individuals to logically soothe intense emotional reactions.
The Role of Neural PathwaysExperience-Dependent Neuroplasticity: The neurons in the limbic system are genetically primed to connect through intimate relationships. Consistent emotional availability from caregivers builds sturdy neural networks that promote resilience.
Reward Pathways: The mesocorticolimbic system (including the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens) releases neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin during positive social interactions. This reinforces the biological drive to seek proximity to attachment figures.
Impact of Trauma: Inconsistent caregiving, neglect, or trauma can cause hyper-reactivity in the threat-detection pathways, leading to long-term difficulties in emotional regulation or future relationships.
Rewiring the BrainThanks to neuroplasticity, these neural pathways are not entirely fixed in adulthood. Safe, secure, and supportive relationships—including therapeutic relationships—can foster the growth of new neural connections, allowing individuals to recalibrate their emotional responses and attachment styles.For further reading on how early bonds form these neural architectures, you can explore the Neural basis of attachment-caregiving systems interaction via the National Institutes of Health.”
If only many people who are umbilically attached to the Bible would seek to read and understand Scott Peck!!
“First published in 1983, People of the Lie: Toward a Psychology of Evil (ISBN 0 7126 1857 0) followed on from Peck's first book. Peck describes the stories of several people who came to him whom he found particularly resistant to any form of help. He came to think of them as evil and goes on to describe the characteristics of evil in psychological terms, proposing that it could become a psychiatric diagnosis. Peck points to narcissism as a type of evil in this context.
Subsequent volumes were subtitled The Hope For Healing Human Evil and Possession and Group Evil.” From Wikipedia
"The cost of accepting the fact is social annihilation inside their family and friend group. The cost of rejecting the fact is zero. "
They don't realize that rejecting the fact is annihilating the trust and esteem of their family and friend group. You might still get invited, but everyone thinks you're terrible.
Mitch, the sections on identity-protective cognition, repetition effects, sunk-cost dynamics, and status anxiety explain why factual contradiction so often fails to move people politically.
Reading it brought Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Hoffer to mind. Bonhoeffer wrote from inside a political movement consuming the institutions around him — including his own church — and his prison writings traced how collective identity, fear, and authority erode independent judgment. Hoffer analyzed the same terrain from the outside, examining in The True Believer how mass movements satisfy deeper human needs for belonging, grievance, certainty, meaning, and purpose. Together they triangulate the phenomenon from different vantage points and push the conversation past misinformation itself, toward the underlying conditions that make powerful movements so enduring. The question shifts from "why don't facts work" to "what are people actually getting from these commitments."
Part of what makes both frameworks continue to resonate is that they are universal rather than partisan. They illuminate patterns that emerge across movements, institutions, ideologies, and eras — and aspects of ourselves we would rather turn a blind eye to.
Toxic shame has been written about until the cows come home.
It’s not getting read by those that would benefit the most. But then Republicans don’t want their voters to be healthy and well, do they?
“John Elliot Bradshaw (June 29, 1933 – May 8, 2016) was an American educator, counselor, motivational speaker, and author who hosted a number of PBS television programs on topics such as addiction, recovery, codependency, and spirituality. Bradshaw was active in the self-helpmovement, and was credited with popularizing such ideas as the "wounded inner child" and the dysfunctional family. In promotional materials, interviews, and reviews of his work, he was often referred to as a theologian.” He wrote Healing the Shame That Binds.
“The fact that rural, economically disadvantaged parts of the country broke heavily for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election is well known. But Medicare data indicate that voters in areas that went for Trump weren't just hurting economically — many of them were receiving prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
One might also consider that deaths of despair are seen much more commonly among populations of people who weren’t parented in a way that gave them the ego and skills needed to succeed.
I knew John Bradshaw, and was familiar with his work through the Palmer Drug Abuse Program in Houston. His framework explains part of what we’re seeing — shame, addiction, wounded identity, compensatory behavior — but I’m not sure it fully accounts for the larger phenomenon, and I’d be careful about where it points.
Bradshaw was largely concerned with damaged individuals. Hoffer and Bonhoeffer were confronting something more enduring and harder to admit: how much of ordinary human perception is organized through collective identity itself. The dynamics aren’t unique to Republicans, or to any single movement or ideology. They recur across societies and eras, often among intelligent, educated, psychologically functional people who are not obviously broken or irrational.
That’s partly why factual contradiction so rarely dissolves these commitments. People don’t experience their deepest collective attachments as interchangeable opinions; they experience them as the structures through which belonging, legitimacy, and reality itself become intelligible. Shame and dislocation can sharpen these dynamics. But the deeper point is that we aren’t vulnerable to these systems only when we’re wounded. We’re vulnerable because the need for meaning and orientation is part of what it is to be a social human being at all.
If that’s right, the line worth watching isn’t between healthy people and damaged ones, or between one party and another. It’s between belonging that can still take in a fact that doesn’t fit, and belonging that has started to treat every contradiction as an attack. The first is just being human. The second is capture — and the tell is that reality stops being information and becomes a threat to be managed.
Which is the part I’d hold onto: these patterns don’t run along the lines we’d prefer. They implicate the people making the diagnosis as much as the people being diagnosed — and the moments we’re most certain we’re seeing clearly are exactly when the mechanism is hardest to catch in ourselves.
It’s as multifactorial and complicated as humanity. We can chip away at what we know works. I would not try to identify a singular reason or means of change for the better. Where we know better we can do better.
Mitch, this will be unusually long but I think you and your readers will get it: First, thank you for sharing this material with such clarity. What your expert outlines — identity‑protective cognition, the illusory truth effect, sunk‑cost entrapment, closed information loops, and the psychological need for a strongman during periods of status anxiety — is not just a snapshot of one political moment. It is a portrait of an extractive political ecology. These mechanisms function like the cognitive infrastructure of extractive capitalism: fast, destabilizing, and profitable only for systems that feed on division, fear, and identity fragmentation. From my vantage point, this is the same architecture that has allowed a deeply antisocial and destabilizing political figure to regain national power with the backing of a Wall Street/Silicon Valley “dark enlightenment” nexus, cryptocurrency speculators, and opportunists aligned with corrupted forms of Christian nationalism. These alliances mirror historic authoritarian and colonial patterns — themes I explore across an 18‑essay series on my Substack, especially Essay XII (structural summary) and Essay XVIII (synthesis).
In my view, the current situation amounts to a mass psychological capture of roughly one‑third of the country — not as a clinical diagnosis, but as a large‑scale social phenomenon shaped by repetition, identity threat, and emotional manipulation. I sometimes describe it metaphorically as an allergen circulating within a controlled matrix: a reactive system that can be significantly neutralized by introducing a kind of “aerosolized antihistamine” in the form of positive, reality‑anchored cultural counterforces. Artists, educators, and public intellectuals play a crucial role here. Voices like Bruce Springsteen, Heather Cox Richardson (especially her “250 to 250” project), Bette Midler’s comedic exposure of authoritarian theatrics, and Stephen Colbert’s confident satire help puncture the dramaturgy of fear and spectacle. These cultural interventions loosen the psychological grip your expert describes and create openings for people — especially newly disillusioned former Trump–Vance supporters — to reassess what they are seeing and experiencing. They are the people with the most standing, in my view, to pressure a corrupted Congress to meet its constitutional responsibilities.
For me, the next step is a strategic, peaceful, mass‑scale boycott of the corporations, financiers, and influence networks that have created the conditions enabling the current political crisis. Boycotts are a long‑standing democratic tool, and I see them as essential for motivating non‑aligned citizens, grassroots democracy defenders, and especially those newly disillusioned voters who may be able to influence a Congress that, in my view, has treasonously failed to act. The goal is not to punish people who were swept into a manipulative system; the goal is to redirect economic power away from colonizing oligarchs and toward a regenerative alternative. That alternative is what I call civic ecological regeneration (CER) — the opposite of extractive capitalism. CER is slow, relational, rooted in community, and capable of growing from seed to seedling to sapling to mature forest. Like the mycorrhizal network — the underground “wood‑wide web” Paul Stamets describes — CER depends on interconnectedness, shared information, and mutual support. In coastal neighborhoods like mine, facing sea‑level rise, intensified storms, and massive infrastructure expansion, CER is not theoretical. It is a practical framework for rebuilding democratic capacity and replacing extractive governance with something resilient, humane, and future‑oriented. Port Dorchester is one such framework — and what we need now is the civic equivalent of jiu‑jitsu: new conditioning paradigms for a new civic consciousness.
“Six. The need for a strongman during status anxiety.” So even if Trump creates the chaotic, anxiety-producing environment, he still solidifies his fake identity as a strong leader? Damn!
On some level, I’m sure he understands this. Our psychology has been weaponized against us by those with something to gain, particularly governments (especially the intelligence apparatus), media, and advertisers. We’re being manipulated 24/7 by these malevolent forces. The majority of the people do not understand this, or apparently even care, so now we’re just sitting ducks in their shooting gallery. The smart move would be to fly away, but there’s nowhere to go.
To me an inability to admit you are/were wrong is narcissism. And allegiance to party over country is treason.
I say this having admitted when party I most affiliate with has been wrong. For one, I left the Republican Party when it began engaging in lies and propaganda with W Bush and Fox News. Prior to that I was more prone to voting republican even though registered as a Dem. Never like Bill Clinton and believe he deserved at least the punishment he received for his deeds.
What the author posits, if true, would mean we can’t get a fair trial against politicians in this country. A scary thought indeed.
All in all, a well written, thought provoking article. I agree that we must keep the receipts. I also believe we are headed for some dark territory where a majority of MAGA has to accept reality. For instance, when they have to make a choice between paying for groceries or gas or mortgage or utilities when they can’t pay them all. The bill is coming due in the form of a tsunami.
It the "Art of the Bullshit" from Trump the master marketer. All politicians are liars and thieves that are in love with there own significance. Trump is the king of narcissism. Welcome to the demonic.
When individuals lose confidence in traditional arbiters of fact (such as courts, federal agencies, and independent journalism) they naturally retreat into closed information ecosystems that validate their pre-existing worldview.
This is an erosion of the infrastructure of trust. And its do quick degrade, but takes ages to build back up. And election cycles are not long enough to reforge that trust.
Great article, and it sits uneasy (uneasily?) with me.
i found the documentary “the brainwashing of my dad” to be helpful understanding trump as well. sadly my own dad became brainwashed watching fox. he was once smart man, but now he sounds like a raving paranoid lunatic.
I have no words.
There is a profound need for identity. In 1990, a state—the GDR—vanished; and with it disappeared a distinct way of life, specific values, the entire industrial sector, the currency, newspapers, television stations, the government—quite simply, everything. What remained were people who had lived for 41 years on the wrong side of the border, and on the wrong side of history. Today, the far-right party AfD enjoys its greatest successes in the territory of the former GDR.
Thank you! That's a great read. I really do hope that you are right that the patience of facts will outlast the cult of repetition. I suspect that it will be a long slow climb for many people.
https://dbm01.substack.com/p/a-key-moment-of-hope
Regarding your expert’s opinion on the Goldwater rule:
““The incoherence is worrisome, possibly dangerous,” said Allen Dyer, a retired psychiatrist and retired George Washington University professor who recommends a full battery of tests…. Dyer, in 1973, helped craft the so-called “Goldwater rule” that he says has been misinterpreted to mean that mental health professionals should never offer their analyses of political figures.
Indeed, Dyer repeatedly emphasized to me that “the Goldwater rule” was intended to be an affirmative obligation to educate society regarding mental health issues that may surround a public figure, without diagnosing—which, as stated above, is impossible, as tempting as it may be to do so. The article cites how twenty mental health experts wrote to the White House physician, calling on him to act on the dangers and to respond to: “the explicit concerns on the part of 36 renowned medical experts and mental health professionals, now entered into the Congressional Record.” What is different this time is that this latter group includes recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, for contributing to reducing nuclear dangers, and former chairs who have held some of the highest leadership positions in the field.”
https://bandyxlee.substack.com/p/the-united-states-of-suicidality?utm_source=direct&r=2xpfg&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
When your neural synapses develop in a home where your experienced reality does not match what you are hearing, then that becomes what you know and find most comforting.
With all the latest neuroscience we have learned why are we not using that information to create more meaningful lives for ourselves???
“Limbic attachment refers to the neurological and emotional bonding between individuals, heavily mediated by the limbic system—the brain's emotional center.
Early-life attachment experiences physically wire the brain's neural pathways, shaping lifelong patterns of emotional regulation, stress response, and social functioning.
Core Brain Structures InvolvedAmygdala: Processes emotional reactivity and fear detection. Secure attachments help regulate this area, preventing it from becoming hyper-reactive.
Hippocampus: Encodes emotional memories. It helps the brain contextualize safety versus threat based on past relational experiences.
Prefrontal Cortex (PFC): Governs executive functions and self-regulation. Strong pathways connect the PFC to the limbic system, allowing individuals to logically soothe intense emotional reactions.
The Role of Neural PathwaysExperience-Dependent Neuroplasticity: The neurons in the limbic system are genetically primed to connect through intimate relationships. Consistent emotional availability from caregivers builds sturdy neural networks that promote resilience.
Reward Pathways: The mesocorticolimbic system (including the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens) releases neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin during positive social interactions. This reinforces the biological drive to seek proximity to attachment figures.
Impact of Trauma: Inconsistent caregiving, neglect, or trauma can cause hyper-reactivity in the threat-detection pathways, leading to long-term difficulties in emotional regulation or future relationships.
Rewiring the BrainThanks to neuroplasticity, these neural pathways are not entirely fixed in adulthood. Safe, secure, and supportive relationships—including therapeutic relationships—can foster the growth of new neural connections, allowing individuals to recalibrate their emotional responses and attachment styles.For further reading on how early bonds form these neural architectures, you can explore the Neural basis of attachment-caregiving systems interaction via the National Institutes of Health.”
You have made their reasons crystal clear, and I find them cowardly and contemptible.
Truth > the familiar.
I knew this when I was 6, and quit believing in Santa Claus.
A man caught in many lies is a liar. Believing him is incongruent with that reality.
God bless Scott Peck! : "Mental health depends on an ongoing commitment to reality."--The Road Less Traveled (may be a slight paraphrase).
If only many people who are umbilically attached to the Bible would seek to read and understand Scott Peck!!
“First published in 1983, People of the Lie: Toward a Psychology of Evil (ISBN 0 7126 1857 0) followed on from Peck's first book. Peck describes the stories of several people who came to him whom he found particularly resistant to any form of help. He came to think of them as evil and goes on to describe the characteristics of evil in psychological terms, proposing that it could become a psychiatric diagnosis. Peck points to narcissism as a type of evil in this context.
Subsequent volumes were subtitled The Hope For Healing Human Evil and Possession and Group Evil.” From Wikipedia
I discovered People of the Lie in the mid-80s when I was in recovery from childhood narcissistic abuse. It was extremely helpful to me.
I also have read his book about community formation and development, and have a copy of his Glimpses of the Devil (2 case studies of possession).
I was quite dismayed when he passed.
"The cost of accepting the fact is social annihilation inside their family and friend group. The cost of rejecting the fact is zero. "
They don't realize that rejecting the fact is annihilating the trust and esteem of their family and friend group. You might still get invited, but everyone thinks you're terrible.
Mitch, the sections on identity-protective cognition, repetition effects, sunk-cost dynamics, and status anxiety explain why factual contradiction so often fails to move people politically.
Reading it brought Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Hoffer to mind. Bonhoeffer wrote from inside a political movement consuming the institutions around him — including his own church — and his prison writings traced how collective identity, fear, and authority erode independent judgment. Hoffer analyzed the same terrain from the outside, examining in The True Believer how mass movements satisfy deeper human needs for belonging, grievance, certainty, meaning, and purpose. Together they triangulate the phenomenon from different vantage points and push the conversation past misinformation itself, toward the underlying conditions that make powerful movements so enduring. The question shifts from "why don't facts work" to "what are people actually getting from these commitments."
Part of what makes both frameworks continue to resonate is that they are universal rather than partisan. They illuminate patterns that emerge across movements, institutions, ideologies, and eras — and aspects of ourselves we would rather turn a blind eye to.
Toxic shame has been written about until the cows come home.
It’s not getting read by those that would benefit the most. But then Republicans don’t want their voters to be healthy and well, do they?
“John Elliot Bradshaw (June 29, 1933 – May 8, 2016) was an American educator, counselor, motivational speaker, and author who hosted a number of PBS television programs on topics such as addiction, recovery, codependency, and spirituality. Bradshaw was active in the self-helpmovement, and was credited with popularizing such ideas as the "wounded inner child" and the dysfunctional family. In promotional materials, interviews, and reviews of his work, he was often referred to as a theologian.” He wrote Healing the Shame That Binds.
“The fact that rural, economically disadvantaged parts of the country broke heavily for the Republican candidate in the 2016 election is well known. But Medicare data indicate that voters in areas that went for Trump weren't just hurting economically — many of them were receiving prescriptions for opioid painkillers.
The findings were published Friday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. Researchers found a geographic relationship between support for Trump and prescriptions for opioid painkillers.” https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/06/23/622692550/analysis-finds-geographic-overlap-in-opioid-use-and-trump-support-in-2016
One might also consider that deaths of despair are seen much more commonly among populations of people who weren’t parented in a way that gave them the ego and skills needed to succeed.
I knew John Bradshaw, and was familiar with his work through the Palmer Drug Abuse Program in Houston. His framework explains part of what we’re seeing — shame, addiction, wounded identity, compensatory behavior — but I’m not sure it fully accounts for the larger phenomenon, and I’d be careful about where it points.
Bradshaw was largely concerned with damaged individuals. Hoffer and Bonhoeffer were confronting something more enduring and harder to admit: how much of ordinary human perception is organized through collective identity itself. The dynamics aren’t unique to Republicans, or to any single movement or ideology. They recur across societies and eras, often among intelligent, educated, psychologically functional people who are not obviously broken or irrational.
That’s partly why factual contradiction so rarely dissolves these commitments. People don’t experience their deepest collective attachments as interchangeable opinions; they experience them as the structures through which belonging, legitimacy, and reality itself become intelligible. Shame and dislocation can sharpen these dynamics. But the deeper point is that we aren’t vulnerable to these systems only when we’re wounded. We’re vulnerable because the need for meaning and orientation is part of what it is to be a social human being at all.
If that’s right, the line worth watching isn’t between healthy people and damaged ones, or between one party and another. It’s between belonging that can still take in a fact that doesn’t fit, and belonging that has started to treat every contradiction as an attack. The first is just being human. The second is capture — and the tell is that reality stops being information and becomes a threat to be managed.
Which is the part I’d hold onto: these patterns don’t run along the lines we’d prefer. They implicate the people making the diagnosis as much as the people being diagnosed — and the moments we’re most certain we’re seeing clearly are exactly when the mechanism is hardest to catch in ourselves.
It’s as multifactorial and complicated as humanity. We can chip away at what we know works. I would not try to identify a singular reason or means of change for the better. Where we know better we can do better.
Agreed. Good exchange.
Mitch, this will be unusually long but I think you and your readers will get it: First, thank you for sharing this material with such clarity. What your expert outlines — identity‑protective cognition, the illusory truth effect, sunk‑cost entrapment, closed information loops, and the psychological need for a strongman during periods of status anxiety — is not just a snapshot of one political moment. It is a portrait of an extractive political ecology. These mechanisms function like the cognitive infrastructure of extractive capitalism: fast, destabilizing, and profitable only for systems that feed on division, fear, and identity fragmentation. From my vantage point, this is the same architecture that has allowed a deeply antisocial and destabilizing political figure to regain national power with the backing of a Wall Street/Silicon Valley “dark enlightenment” nexus, cryptocurrency speculators, and opportunists aligned with corrupted forms of Christian nationalism. These alliances mirror historic authoritarian and colonial patterns — themes I explore across an 18‑essay series on my Substack, especially Essay XII (structural summary) and Essay XVIII (synthesis).
In my view, the current situation amounts to a mass psychological capture of roughly one‑third of the country — not as a clinical diagnosis, but as a large‑scale social phenomenon shaped by repetition, identity threat, and emotional manipulation. I sometimes describe it metaphorically as an allergen circulating within a controlled matrix: a reactive system that can be significantly neutralized by introducing a kind of “aerosolized antihistamine” in the form of positive, reality‑anchored cultural counterforces. Artists, educators, and public intellectuals play a crucial role here. Voices like Bruce Springsteen, Heather Cox Richardson (especially her “250 to 250” project), Bette Midler’s comedic exposure of authoritarian theatrics, and Stephen Colbert’s confident satire help puncture the dramaturgy of fear and spectacle. These cultural interventions loosen the psychological grip your expert describes and create openings for people — especially newly disillusioned former Trump–Vance supporters — to reassess what they are seeing and experiencing. They are the people with the most standing, in my view, to pressure a corrupted Congress to meet its constitutional responsibilities.
For me, the next step is a strategic, peaceful, mass‑scale boycott of the corporations, financiers, and influence networks that have created the conditions enabling the current political crisis. Boycotts are a long‑standing democratic tool, and I see them as essential for motivating non‑aligned citizens, grassroots democracy defenders, and especially those newly disillusioned voters who may be able to influence a Congress that, in my view, has treasonously failed to act. The goal is not to punish people who were swept into a manipulative system; the goal is to redirect economic power away from colonizing oligarchs and toward a regenerative alternative. That alternative is what I call civic ecological regeneration (CER) — the opposite of extractive capitalism. CER is slow, relational, rooted in community, and capable of growing from seed to seedling to sapling to mature forest. Like the mycorrhizal network — the underground “wood‑wide web” Paul Stamets describes — CER depends on interconnectedness, shared information, and mutual support. In coastal neighborhoods like mine, facing sea‑level rise, intensified storms, and massive infrastructure expansion, CER is not theoretical. It is a practical framework for rebuilding democratic capacity and replacing extractive governance with something resilient, humane, and future‑oriented. Port Dorchester is one such framework — and what we need now is the civic equivalent of jiu‑jitsu: new conditioning paradigms for a new civic consciousness.
“Six. The need for a strongman during status anxiety.” So even if Trump creates the chaotic, anxiety-producing environment, he still solidifies his fake identity as a strong leader? Damn!
On some level, I’m sure he understands this. Our psychology has been weaponized against us by those with something to gain, particularly governments (especially the intelligence apparatus), media, and advertisers. We’re being manipulated 24/7 by these malevolent forces. The majority of the people do not understand this, or apparently even care, so now we’re just sitting ducks in their shooting gallery. The smart move would be to fly away, but there’s nowhere to go.
People often assume belief is primarily about facts.
It is usually about emotional architecture.
A person will tolerate enormous factual contradictions if the narrative gives them identity, meaning, belonging, protection, or psychological order.
That is why purely fact-based attacks often fail.
You are not arguing against information.
You are arguing against a social operating system.
Modern politics increasingly behaves less like policy competition and more like rival reality-maintenance systems.
Once trust collapses, people stop asking:
“Is this true?”
And start asking:
“Does this protect my tribe, identity, and worldview?”
That is a much harder thing to debate.
To me an inability to admit you are/were wrong is narcissism. And allegiance to party over country is treason.
I say this having admitted when party I most affiliate with has been wrong. For one, I left the Republican Party when it began engaging in lies and propaganda with W Bush and Fox News. Prior to that I was more prone to voting republican even though registered as a Dem. Never like Bill Clinton and believe he deserved at least the punishment he received for his deeds.
What the author posits, if true, would mean we can’t get a fair trial against politicians in this country. A scary thought indeed.
All in all, a well written, thought provoking article. I agree that we must keep the receipts. I also believe we are headed for some dark territory where a majority of MAGA has to accept reality. For instance, when they have to make a choice between paying for groceries or gas or mortgage or utilities when they can’t pay them all. The bill is coming due in the form of a tsunami.
It the "Art of the Bullshit" from Trump the master marketer. All politicians are liars and thieves that are in love with there own significance. Trump is the king of narcissism. Welcome to the demonic.
Short answer: he gave permission to be racist and ignorant...