I haven’t really written much about the Trump administration since the election. Most of it, quite frankly, because of the derangement of the Left, and unfortunately, in particular, my age cohort (I’m 62.) Upon being told that I voted for Donald Trump, I’ve dealt with long-time friends basically disowning me. And even though I live the life of an oddly functional hermit, I still find it disturbing.
There is an axis of civilization that runs N/S through society, with independently generated, empathy-driven relationships on the north end, and with externally defined, belief-based, and title-driven relationships on the south end. One of the reasons that you make so many friends when you’re young is your neuroplasticity is high, and you have few ingratiated experiences leaving isolated biased tags in your hippocampus, causing you to have limbic withdrawal for nonspecific reasons. As people age, though, most folks do not continue to proceed upward along the path of wisdom, acceptance of metacognition, and a more conscious, questioning and data-driven perspective toward life’s circumstances. Instead, biases become even more rigid, and if you’re not in an environment where you’re encouraged to keep a flexible perspective, mental decline is inevitable.
And so it’s happened with my friend cohort. I have yet to be asked by almost anyone exactly “why” I voted for Trump, among anyone that I’ve known over 10 years. I have my reasons. The Democrats kept a man with a pudding brain in office for four years, and offered up a combo cipher/alcoholic as the replacement, in a midnight coup that turned out to be disastrous for their political fortunes. I voted for the counter-elites I describe in this piece.
But worse were the narratives that the Ds rallied behind. Almost all of these, outside of the typical bland “we’re going to fix the economy” non-specifics, were what I call Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It’s a governing story that can be detected by a series of factors:
- No absolute metrics of any particular policy issue. Everything is relative, and explained in relative terms.
- Expectation of the national interest to forfeit any larger sense of self-survival.
- Demonization if one protests the myth, instead of consideration of personal interest of any constituency.
- Boundary collapse across the psycho-social landscape of a society.
It’s not hard to dissect any of the policies of the Democratic Party along these four lines. Take open-border immigration, and the flood of illegal immigrants into our country. While there were vague discussions of immigration (we need more LEGAL immigration, whatever that meant!) there were never any numbers discussed (#1). Additionally arguments were constantly generated along the lines of allowing more people in, regardless of national origin, because relative to the general population, suspicious figures were floated saying “any immigrants are just better people than the people already here.” Things like the fact that more people add a quantum to your chance of being murdered, raped, or robbed simply didn’t matter. If they weren’t here, your numbers wouldn’t go up.
And subsequent to that is the current war over deportation of various gang members and criminals that are already here. Look folks — if you entered the country illegally, then you are a criminal by definition. But there is quite a gradient even among that crew. The recent procedural doubling down on Juan Abrego Garcia, a domestic violence perpetrator and likely gang member, shows that the Democrats aren’t really interested in having a functional country. All the various cries about “due process” are largely irrelevant, as “due process” as a term means, a la Humpty Dumpty, whatever we want it to mean.
The Democratic goal is derailment of society, building on the efforts already started by the non-functional Biden regime. What is especially laughable is that currently, in our legal system, what is known as “prosecutorial justice” — where a perp strikes a deal with the prosecutor — dominates some 97% of all criminal justice. That means “due process” means someone accusing you, with a modest basis, and then you figure out how you’re going to give in to avoid time in the Big House. It only involves an investigation by police, with the prosecutor’s assent. And that’s for citizens — which is NOT required in immigration law. “Due process” is another Collapse Narrative.
That leads us to #2, which then gets back to some needed sense of cultural homogeneity. Countries can be diverse — but you get to the point where societies have no assimilative power whatsoever. That is inevitably going to lead to conflict among parties, in unexpected ways. I was raised as a Catholic, with a Muslim background (my father was Iranian, but an avowed atheist) — but I have no desire to live in a predominantly Muslim country. Islam has lots of problems that I’m directly familiar with, that I haven’t written about because it would distort a lot of the other information I’m transmitting on this blog. And I can tell you there are reasons that various Islamic countries are societal backwaters.
To even voice these types of observations — that there is a scale we can measure cultures on regarding being better or worse for human flourishing — can rapidly lead to demonization (#3) of the writer. Post-modernism has led us to the point where we see LGBTQ people protesting FOR Palestine as some kind of Promised Land. I can guarantee the idiocy of this level of affinity of self-interest is appalling. I view the current Israeli/Palestinian War as a profound tragedy, for both sides, which is also why I haven’t written about it. But it’s also true that the same constituency screaming against Israel would be rounded up and exterminated by those same people they’re ostensibly attempting to save. It’s just a fact.
I also view the outcome as historically predictable. You fly a bunch of males organized by a neo-medieval government in motorized parawings into a country, who then kill, rape and kidnap 1400 or some odd women and men, you’re asking for total war. The only parallel I can come up with is Arthur “Bomber” Harris in World War II, head of RAF bomber command. Given the job of stopping the Nazis, he was paramount in making a Nazi surrender irrelevant. He did this by functionally leveling literally every German city of a particular size, by fire-bombing them. I absolutely do not condone genocide — but patterns of history repeat themselves.
And getting back to the point — it’s a profound Collapse Narrative when you advocate for people who, given the chance would kill and enslave you.
Finally, looking at #4, boundary collapse is written all over the various Collapse Narratives the Left ascribes to. Men in women’s sports, or bathrooms — talk about a historic removal of sex boundaries. The war in Ukraine — we have nothing to gain by continuing the war, other than loss of national treasure as part of a perverse globalist enterprise. Yet I have many acquaintances that would demonize me if they knew my views. That’s a crazy Collapse Narrative — that our friendship is more worthless to them than a particular In-group view, on a conflict with no geographic resonance, that has absolutely no bearing on our actual relationship.
Organisms, including nations, collapse if they cannot maintain homeostasis and intact boundaries. Every organism alive exists with some combination of flux of nutrients and influences from the outside world, along with the ability to modulate those same inputs. A human being is itself only a modestly 3 dimensional prospect, with a mouth, fractal structures called alveoli in one’s lungs, and an alimentary system for absorbing food. Too much stuff comes in over the boundaries and a person dies. Collapse Narratives demand exceeding those boundary limitations, both biological and psychic.
What’s even worse is that we have an entire elite class championing obvious Collapse Narratives as virtuous. None of the dominant myths used to signal virtue by our elites have any practical benefit to the majority of the population. And they’re directly fraudulent. When Trump’s immigration crackdown commenced, all the major news outlets binged on the notion that vegetables would rot in the fields, and a famine would ensue across the land. Yet every day, going to the grocery store, there was nothing but the usual fresh vegetables available for sale.
On the issue of Trump’s tariffs — an attempted re-balancing of trade, at least with the intention of moving us back from the heavy financialization of our work sector to more manufacturing, the elite class screamed bloody murder. I’d like to think that at least a little of this screaming was rational — tariffs and global trade are an evolutionary system, and interconnections are many, and hidden. But it turned into more screaming that an international order that had benefitted elites was actually what was at stake. The isolation of the professional class from the needs of the working class had been thorough before 2020, and certainly exacerbated by COVID. Populism had been mapped to Nazism in the press. And the resistance toward this was another example of a Collapse Narrative.
One of the most pervasive of the Collapse Narratives has been the very real societal war around mainstreaming transgenderism — especially in youth. California and other Blue states have been famous for going so far to hide childrens’ depression and gender dysphoria away from parents with legitimate guardianship rights. Destroying families is directly advocating for collapse. Families are far from perfect as support mechanisms for individuals. But I can tell you, as someone who only has my immediate children and wife, they’re far better than nothing.
And then there is the issue of men in women’s sports. Democrats, even in the face or realizing how divisive this issue is to the public, constant dissemble on it. “It’s only a few kids,” is the classic riposte. If it’s only a few kids, then why die on that hill? The more I dig into this, the more obvious it becomes that there is a ton of psychopathy behind many of the transgender champions, as well as the champions of the champions. Giving in would mean giving away a powerful tool of disruption of society. And so another Collapse Narrative is born.
Societies are oriented, North/South, along a line that maps to the v-Memes I talk extensively about on this blog. The north end of societies are predicated on cultures that support individual choice, and develop people who are actually capable of handling those individual choices in a responsible, connected fashion. Down at the bottom are non-differentiated Tribal societies, where everyone inside the dominant group are “the people”, and everyone outside is worse than disposable.
You cannot have the current complexity of society without a well-scaffolded stack, because without that, your society has no hope in hell of generating the complex web of information such a society needs to exist. And that stack is based on data-driven, trust based relationships. You have to have scaffolded trust not just for moral values. You actually need it or you can’t support the number of transactions, information and otherwise, to make it happen. Transaction velocity matters, and translates to sophistication of products, as well as diversity and quantity of goods on the shelf.
And the core of that is development of the individual, as what my friend Daniel Goertz calls the “dividual” — the person in context of themselves, and the society.
Collapse Narratives are crafted by psychopaths to undermine that concept — through an advocacy of self- and societally destructive myths that break down an individual and their boundaries and turn them into an organic soup, not unlike what happens to a caterpillar in a chrysalis. But it’s highly unlikely, after the mass killing that actual collapse will entail, that much of a butterfly will pop out.

I’m sorry to say I, too, am an old friend who has basically disowned you. The reason is not that I am some radical left nut job; I am conservative in my approach to economic, fiscal, and governance issues in the ordinary (as opposed to political) sense of the word. The example and instruction of a kind, firm, and good family, education in macroeconomics, early experiences as a federal bank examiner, and career in the financial analysis of banks and study of their loan portfolios provided almost daily observations of the many ways that humans practice fraud, deceit, and betrayal in their urgent, unslakable desire for wealth and dominance. All that, plus the then-recent history of WWII and the rise and methods of Hitler and Stalin, the ongoing Cold War, and the profound deceptions underlying the Vietnam and Iraq wars all combined in me as revulsion, detestation, and indeed hatred of planned, systematic, and deliberate deceit and perversion of good, along with a strong drive to think for myself and examine the motives of authority and charisma.
The speech, writing, and behavior of Donald Trump, his followers, and their peers is exactly the kind of subversive deception that spewed from the minds of Hitler and Goebbels, Stalin and Shepilov and their aptly named Departments of Propaganda and Agitation. The cunning combination of nuggets of shared prejudice with far-too-often deliberately false accusations of criminality, sexual perversion, evil intentions and the like, all tossed up in a word salad of pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical ideotology enabled these men to bring their societies to the point of war, mass murder, gulags and concentration camps, starvation, and poverty. I can’t imagine how they could have more effectively achieved such catastrophic results in such short periods. Perhaps if they had had degenerate, perverted geniuses like Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein as mentors/influencers they might have been even faster.
The works of Trump and his cultish followers are bathed in exactly this light. They are, beyond any doubt, diligently hewing our society into the same form, in the same manner, toward the same end as Hitler, Stalin, and their current exemplars Putin, Kiselyov, Simonyan, and their attacking hordes of agitprop functionaries. These kinds of personalities are destructive toward the very concept of truth to a degree and with a ferocity that a sane mind, functioning to the best of its abilities on the truth and trust that tie healthy societies together, often cannot imagine (and thus perceive) until it is too late without training, education, and experience. Trumpery World ascribes such invidious motives as explicitly working to destroy society to the amorphous “Others” it inveighs against, but betrays by its very language that it, not the “others”, are in fact the perpetrators. These people are far beyond normal political disagreement or discourse; this is deliberate, the ultimate bad-faith deceit, and it’s the order of the day. These behaviors, added to a mass of individually trivial circumstance, and Trump’s relationship with Putin (a self-avowed enemy of the United States and western civilization) induce rational observers to wonder if there is treason is afoot.
Whatever the real crimes, sins, follies, foibles of Democratic Party adherents, “lefties”, “woke folk”, bureaucrats, “liberals”, RINOs, the weather service, the CDC, Hollywood, and the rest of the endless litany of “Others”, they pale into insignificance by comparison with the gross tyranny that is always, always engendered by the deliberate destruction of truth. The elevation of sexual perversion to the hitherto unimaginable status it has achieved in law, media, education, and apparently society is perhaps the grossest example of “liberal” folly. In fact, there is nothing liberal about perverting anything, let alone sex. That some unknown degree of it occurs across humanity is not to the point. The point is that it has a shocking, searing, permanent effect on the minds of defenseless children, perhaps even more so than normal sexuality, which is powerful enough. That is why we shelter children; to protect their emotional and intellectual development from shattering experiences, such as sexuality and drugs, that a child too often has no defenses against and succumbs to the shock. Exposing them to this, as well as to the God-damned predators (sexual, financial, political, religious, whatever) that flock to every opportunity and infest every walk of life, greatly diminishes us all.
I have railed throughout my life against the deceits practiced by the criminal demographic among those who are responsible for leading our institutions, and who so stridently demand honesty and integrity from those they lead. That, however, is mere garden variety corruption compared to The Dictators. Association with dictators is very dangerous, and now you damnable fools have elected a prime example to “lead” us. Loot us is more likely. By the same token, association with even a dictator’s lowliest devotees will become dangerous, as denunciation to the loyalty police will soon become an ever-present hazard to the middle classes, then the masses, just as it now is to the prominent. Of course the harshness of punishment will increase with the capture of power; it always does, aided by the fact that the flats can’t fight back, once they’ve been tied down and robbed.
Your writing, Dr. Pezeshki, has taken on the structure, form and content of this oeuvre to an unsavory degree. All of the requisite elements are here, in this post, and in profusion. Ridiculously impossible lies, so much so as to render the writer ridiculous. I’ve been your friend for what, 16 years or so? You taught me woodworking, you and Alicia shared my house, we did this and that, I was an uncle for the boys. I didn’t see this coming, though the signs surely must have been there. Regardless, as things stand I shouldn’t trust you, and I don’t. How can I? You wonder where your friends have gone? They are quietly drifting away in hopes they’ll be forgotten before whatever some Homan decides to call the Gestapo this time around gets organized enough to be dangerous.
Goodbye, sir. If you can reclaim your mind, perhaps we’ll be friends again.
Peace be with us all, Charles E. Caylor
5/4/25 4:35 PM, It’s About Empathy – Connecti
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Chuck — we’ll discuss over a tri-tip. Sorry to hear it, though.
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#TrumpIsWhatMustBeDone – “collapse narratives” … If it can be destroyed with the truth then it ought to be destroyed.
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Hi Chuck & Chuck,
Sorry to see this divide, and we all see it everywhere. It is the divide between those who see the system as very badly broken, and in need of extensive rebuilding, and those who deny that it is like that, though it could always use some work.
“Brokenists” and “Denialists” are the groups, not so much right and left, Republicans or Democrats. “Brokenism” is my post, based upon an essay detailing that analysis. https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/brokenism
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Just happened to see this essay. It’s very good, and goes beyond the ideal of keep an eye on the RightWing so you can fight them..
I think about your Muslim background. And don’t deny you are right- that Islam can turn against Americans of religious freedom and liberty..
But I would have to know more about you before I can renounce freedom…
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I don’t like the Trump Loyalty perpetuated by some immigrant families..
Like the new immigrant that went on the radio, saying Trump is the only candidate who took a bullet for America…
American history remembers Robert Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt , George Wallace- all shot while campaigning…
And let’s not forget Ford, Reagan, Lincoln, John Kennedy- all shot while in duty to America..
Does it sound like I am looking to mistrust people with global, varying backgrounds , to write our American history? No . I just think there’s always an argument, that labels don’t truly define EVERYTHING. Labels are here- but still a good essay.
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