psychopaths

Memetic Conflict and Perceived Moral Order

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment
North Fork Clearwater, Idaho, Drone Shot

One of my favorite pieces of mental work that I figured out in the old noggin is this piece here — the origins of memetic conflict that happens when different value systems collide. In order to completely grok it, you’re going to have to read a little about v-Memes — it’s not that hard. But the short answer is that when different societies, based on different social structures, run into each other over contested ground, how evolved those systems are will definitely decide the outcome.

The short version is that in the classic Spiral Dynamics progression of societies — Survival, Tribal, Authoritarian, Legalistic, Performance-Based, Communitarian and on into the Second Tier — misunderstanding and conflict will depend on the memetic spacing of levels between the two conflicting social structures. Two levels (e.g. between Tribal and Legalistic) will result in Incomprehension — the two systems cannot understand each other. Three levels? What I describe as the Insanity/Barbarism conflict, which is what is happening currently in the conflict over ICE in Minnesota.

Here’s the social structures from Don Beck as a refresher.

Through a complicated path, mostly committed by psychopaths seizing control of dominant foundational myths in the Lefty Noosphere, the current Democratic Party has reverted primarily to Tribal knowledge structures. That drives emergent focus on Donald Trump as some version of The Great Satan, and a pathology across Lefties of all stripes, but especially their intellectual caste, with what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The justification for TDS is honestly monotonous, and is an exemplar of how higher knowledge structures that may have been present in individuals, necessarily simplify and rigidify when downconverted into Tribal forms. Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt, Trump is buddies with Epstein and a pedophile, and so on. No amount of context can derail this myth structure, other than the Left being forced to recognize that Trump is still President.

This is powerful when coded into some form of exchangeable morality — numerous folks don’t have to know much to “virtue signal” — communicate to others in the tribe their status through ostensible piety, of these foundational myths. It IS true that most of these Tribal myths are all centered around “Trump as a dishonorable, evil man.” The problem is that the world is a more complex place than whether you hate Donald Trump or not. And to some extent, the Republicans aren’t helping much, either. The current Republican administration is hardcore Performance/Goal-Based thinking. The one thing that matters is getting done whatever the governing item is. And Trump engages in constant negotiations with his adversaries, obviously due to his background as a New York real estate mogul.

This comes off as absolutely insane to the Lefty In-group/Out-group Tribalists, who, with poor consequential thinking, cannot perceive how they’ve been co-opted by their parasitic psychopath class, who had prior to Trump and Elon Musk showing up, had established a rich vein of revenue through exploitation of face-value virtue-laden topics that the majority of their base had lapped right up. “USAID is saving starving kids in Africa!” is one of my favorites. Why? I worked for USAID in Egypt, and had the surreal opportunity of seeing how they actually worked. I was window dressing for some competing ruling faction in Egypt at the time, supposedly working on a fertilizer plant control system, which then was one of the projects providing cover for the deep political machinations going on, facilitated by political US meddling. The end result of which was the Arab Spring, one of the original Color Revolutions, which did not quite go the way we planned.

The larger Republican Party is not completely Performance-based. There are still components that have strong Authoritarian bents (the Christian Right) as well as a large institutional caste of actors, named along with their Democratic counterparts, the Deep State, occupying the Legalistic v-Meme. If the Republicans seem diffuse as far as worldview, it’s because they are. While the Democrats are spiraling out of control on pure Tribalism, the Republicans face a queasy coalition centered around less government and traditional government favors to corporations and businesses. Which is problematic, because while the Democrats can coalesce around absolutely insane myths, like gender identity is only determined by how a person feels today. And because of their simplicity, these information structures are truncated, based on emotional appeal and very viral.

And so we end up in the current disaster in Minneapolis. In the last few weeks, two “activists” have been shot and killed. Theoretically, these “activists” are somehow nonviolent Legal Observers and merely traveling around after ICE and documenting arrests made by ICE. The videos of what actually is happening, and other recent disclosures regarding their organization, do, in no way shape or form, support any of this. The activists are extremely well-organized and coordinated in a network where individuals are dispatched via the messaging app Signal to tail ICE vehicles, and upon arriving on the scene, disrupt ICE arrests of illegal immigrants. When they arrive, they act literally like insane monkeys on meth, often closing distance with ICE agents face-to-face, while blowing whistles and horns. With the recent information regarding Signal app organizing, it is my belief that they could actually be considered a criminal conspiracy, subject to Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sanctions.

Of course, the PROBLEM is within the context of their Tribal situation, sprinkled with fragmented myths about Constitutional function, is that they don’t perceive themselves as a criminal operation. Self awareness is pathetically low. And that is deeply problematic when dealing with the outside world. The second person shot, Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ER nurse — far past the age to rationalize this kind of behavior with youthful ignorance, showed up for his round in the “chase the ICE agents and harass them” sporting a handgun — a Sig Sauer 9mm. One of the unbreakable rules in my world, when I was helping run a large civil disobedience campaign, was NO GUNS. You don’t have guns at a protest, because if things go south, and sometimes they do, LEOs can kill you legally. And then you’re dead.

This particular type of Sig Sauer also has a handling misfire problem, and if dropped, can go off. It’s also no surprise to me that it was an ER nurse who made such a bad judgment call. ER staff were the worst of the COVID alarmist crowd, and there’s also no question that trauma can stack up and cause erratic reactions in stressful situations. Immediately, the propaganda side on the Left seized on the notion that Alex had a legal concealed carry permit, and in the classic distortion of thought that is haunting the Left nowadays, put that in the blender and came out with “ICE needs to adapt their tactics to support Legal Observers’ Second Amendment rights to carry hand guns into violent situations and conflicts with ICE officers.” Are you kidding me?

Even while they’re acting like meth-crazed monkeys. I watched the videos involving the incident where the gun went off (my guess is likely a misfire) and then what happened is what can happen in any LEO arrest scenario. Once the cop thinks either he or his buddy is under threat from a firearm, the cop will proceed to empty their clip into the suspect. Which usually means a dead perp. Much was also made in this Lefty propaganda round about how he was defending a woman “activist/Legal observer.” The clip I saw didn’t include the prior where she got into it with the ICE agents. But I’ve been in enough situations to know that a certain subset of women will fly off the handle, and believe they are the reincarnation of an invincible Valkyrie, and aggressively attack even LEOs. Call it the Mama Bear Social Control response. I even trained my two sons, now ages 25 and 27, when they were 16 and 18, what to do in a situation with potential law enforcement involvement (say a fight at a party.). They are both strapping young lads, and they both know that they are supposed to grab their girlfriends and run like hell, preferably before the cops show up. And if the girlfriend is dancing on his arm, screaming about her honor, and won’t leave — then ditch her. Cops will always threat-assess, and my two sons are 6’3″ and 6’5″. Which means one is going on the bumper with the bracelets, and the other is going in the backseat of the cruiser. The cop is not going to care about any dancing fairy princess.

Once again, the arguments from the Left to support their position are the result of projection and supposition — perceived moral order. Not validity grounding with anything resembling reality. I think it’s hard to understand this completely. I think a lot of the people involved in the obstruction of ICE in MN are likely middle-class, and have little to no experience with law enforcement. So they view themselves as White Knights, endorsed by their communities, and encouraged by local and state leadership in these actions. They view that because these various state and local officials have endorsed their moral position, and said they are brave and courageous, that somehow these ostensibly powerful people will rescue them. Little do they realize that their distorted sense of morality has no real power in a federal courtroom. And the other key fact is that they also are patsies ripe for disavowal by exactly those same individuals.

And what to think of the state and other government officials encouraging the insurrection? They’re locked in a deal with utter personal destruction once all is revealed. There’s tons of Somali daycare and medical service fraud that it is simply impossible to believe local and state officials either ignored, or were directly on the take. Fraud in Blue States is going to be an emergent issue in the coming New Year. While the Minnesota cabal, including Tim Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, seem to be mostly passively raking in the cash, and NOT involving the crazy gangland violence on the US southern border, it still means that this will be certainly the end of their political careers and inflated standard of living (Walz has already stepped down from running in the next election.)

But there are larger implications nationally. It’s through a glass darkly on what has been going on in our western southern tier, whose political caste is thoroughly intertwined with far more malevolent actors than the displaced Somali pirates in Ohio and Minnesota. You don’t have to stretch the Overton Window too far to see how the CIA facilitated Somali immigration, starting in the ’90s. But most of what came across the southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency came courtesy of the Sinaloan and other cartels. Walz and his crooked cohort may just end their lives in the big house. But that’s not the same for the various political forces across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The cartels are fond of torture and execution. And the Pandora’s box of inflated human trafficking revenue that happened through the betrayal of the Biden administration, and in particular Alejandro Mayorkas, has collapsed. No real natural born killer is going to take that lying down. The cockroaches are going to eat themselves.

Getting back to the primary point of this piece — the Left has left itself open to destruction in the context of memetic understanding by viewing the current administration as insane. They’re not. The problem is the flip side of the memetic conflict is that the Right views them as barbarians, which is decidedly not how the Left views themselves. The Left better get over its fascination with its self-generated moral order, and quick. The federal government, as well as most of the country, is nowhere near the point of collapse. And while the Left may not view themselves that way, the Trump administration, especially in the context of its goal-oriented focus of clearing out illegal aliens doesn’t give a shit about their moral order. They possess the reins of law and order on their side. And in the end, law and order are popular with the general population.

And as the effects of brainwashing using permission structures, started by David Axelrod and Barack Obama, wash off, my bet is no one is going to give a damn about the ginned up Lefty moral order that was potentially not created, but certainly accelerated, during the fractured COVID years. And grounding back to reality is brutal. It involves arcing.

And that means someone is going to get severely burned.

Quickie Post — Using Images to Psychopathically Relocate Debate

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Welsh Countryside

One of the more pathologically interesting recent trends in journalism — it’s been going on for about the last 30 years — is creating new nominally ethical, but actually classic double-bind rules about what pictures, depicting people involved, that should be shown in stories. Pictures of any sort are very interesting from a neurogenic perspective, because they enter through one of most evolved pieces of hardware in the brain — the visual cortex. And because our evolutionary history is such that we “see” something, and then act on it, there are ingrained patterns in the visual cortex about risk evaluation to our persons that inherently happen there, or adjacent.

I can’t remember when it started exactly, but the shift seemed to occur with covering murders or school shootings. The ostensibly virtuous crowd said “we shouldn’t put the picture of the shooter up! We should honor the victims!” And while on the surface, that seems nice, it’s a diabolical hack on how the brain works. The brain WANTS to recognize threats. And when you put up a picture of slaughtered schoolchildren, all you do is provide traumatic pattern-matching for parents, while at the same time, avoiding any real information transmission to the larger body politic on where the problem actually is.

Certainly this is done with random murders. Like it or not, the vast majority of murders are committed by black males in their teens and twenties. But you can see how this might go against the agendas of those looking to cover up this chronic problem, which sadly affects individuals in the black community more than anyone.

Worse, you start shifting the larger meta-meaning of pictures in general. If the only pictures that are shown, over time, are victims, the brain can be trained to then believe anyone having their photo taken in a violent situation is a victim. Context is established merely through publication.

Recently, in the contested street violence in Minneapolis, MN, over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the media has been portraying various protestors, especially in static photo form, as victims. But if you watch any of the plethora of videos, you’ll not see peaceful protests, nor protestors. What you WILL see is a selection of people (primarily middle-aged white women) behaving like monkeys laced with methamphetamine, screaming at the top of their lungs, at ICE agents attempting to arrest illegal immigrants. This particular cadre of illegal immigrants is not law-abiding. There is a current amnesty policy for these immigrants that if they self-deport, they will be given a free plane ticket and $3000 for their troubles. That means you can expect the ones that refuse the deal to also be fugitives, and will run like hell when the noose closes.

And they do, which then interjects screaming meth monkey protestors in with the Running Man. The ICE agents are actually in the middle of the mess. And if you know much about any arrest scenario, it is never gentle. Chris Rock, the famous comedian, has said “if you run from the police, expect to get an ass-whooping.” The fact that the middle-aged female meth monkey contingent are surprised by any of this shows how insulated they are from reality.

Here’s where the psychopathy of the press comes in. The press is all down with Collapse Narratives — promoting stories that will generate societal collapse — so the recent inversion of photographic meaning suits their purposes to a T. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran this picture on their front page.

Now consider past programming. Your instantaneous reaction is this person must be a victim, and experiencing violence for no other reason than ICE is evil. That is the result of the endless conditioning discussed above. And here’s the ambiguity — I don’t know the exact environmental conditions at the time of this photo. But the fact that the photographer can get in so close to an arrest scenario guarantees that ICE is actually remarkably restrained. And if this guy ended up getting this treatment, I guarantee he was going full “meth monkey” before ICE tossed him to the ground and immobilized him.

Lots of psychopathic things are going on just in this scenario. Abuse of the definition of what a 1st Amendment right to protest is one of them. But the whole thing is not as emergent as it seems. Photographers AND movement activists manipulate circumstances to win public opinion. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell even discussed the history in the Civil Rights movement that had psychopathic staging generated by activist Wyatt Walker , which generated the famous photos of children being attacked by dogs in 1963 Birmingham.

The bottom line is the same, of course. Psychopathic manipulation using reversed core psychology is everywhere in our media markets. The goal of all of this is to make you believe that things are what you think you see, where your native instincts provide the context. But it’s that preying on your hardware that’s going on. And it’s almost always to get you to act against your interests. Like an anglerfish dangling its bait in front of your hapless face, the goal is to swallow you whole.

Psychopaths, Innumeracy, and Greenland

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Winter day above the Clearwater River

One of the largest problems facing society in the current complexity crisis is the chronic persistence of innumeracy. If we remember that expanded relational sense actually relies on understandings of time and space, then innumeracy is a root cause. You can’t have a sense of history if you have no anchoring in what it means to live 50 years ago — let alone 1000 years ago. And our understanding of spatial scales is also tied to innumeracy. One of my favorite tells of being American is identification with the state in which you reside. If you’re talking to anyone outside the US, unless you’re in California, Texas or New York, you’re going to get a bemused blank stare. Certainly not going to help you understand where Vietnam is.

And in a world increasingly dominated by numbers, that’s a problem. Because you’re supposed to ‘get’ this locational sense. And that means when you don’t, people are going to think you’re an idiot. A classic emperor’s new clothes deal — folks oughta know better. But they just don’t.

Of course, understanding any number is key on establishing context — which may include even more numbers, or transforms of numbers. And when that’s the case, you have to add either algorithms, or best guesses, or maybe even shared perceptions. It gets complicated quickly. Or rather, complex. And what does that mean? The minute things get too scrambled, we scurry around looking for an authority to tell us what this means.

Which is where the problem arises. The minute you go looking for that authority, you are now playing in the field of psychopathy. Psychopaths are the ones that are more than happy to take your perceptions — maybe in your conscious mind — and turn them into emotions. And once that happens, you’re open to manipulation. The psychopath doesn’t even have to understand the numbers, nor their meaning, themselves. One of the aspects of beauty of the new world of AI and LLMs is we are seeing you don’t really need any understanding of anything to train your own personal LLM inside your head in spitting out an actionable response that will move a token around on the game board. You just have to have run that program through enough training data to know you’re going to get the outcome you want. One of my favorite scenes, in one of my favorite movies, ‘The Dark Knight” (with Heath Ledger’s Joker) is in the hospital, where Two-Face accuses him of having a plan. “Do I look like a guy with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”

So that’s what psychopaths do. And it’s wickedly effective in a society that refuses to slow down and think.

One of my favorite uses of innumeracy as a weapon of terror is the current kerfuffle over Greenland. If you go out on the street, and ask folks how many people live in Greenland, you’re likely to get puzzled looks from most folks. Most people have no idea how many people live anywhere, let alone Greenland. Don’t believe me? Go ask folks how many people live in Germany.

But some brave souls will guess. 1 million? 10 million?

The actual answer is 56 thousand, give or take. (FWIW — this is the population size of the isolated area I live in.) And if they’re tuned into the news at all, they’ve likely heard that Donald Trump is currently machinating to take control of Greenland. 51st state or whatever. The real reason, besides some degree of personal ego, is that, if you look at a polar projection map of Greenland, you’ll see it is extremely strategically located for missile and sea defense. We actually own the only military base on Greenland — Pituffik Space Base, where we have a bunch of enormous ballistic missile early warning systems (BMEWS) that look across the polar region to see if Russia is attempting to annihilate us. Greenland is important in the context of creating Trump’s “Golden Dome” plan for missile defense.

Now here’s where the innumeracy and confusion comes in. Headlines regularly blare “US will go to war with Europe over Greenland!” or “The European Union sends troops to Greenland to defend against US aggression or threats of seizure!” Troops are obviously an amalgam mental model inside media market heads — and the transformation algorithm is to take some idea of the situation and move it into people’s limbic/emotional regions, so they can, well, basically, hate Donald Trump.

The number of troops from European partners sent to Greenland? At the time, less than 50. And Greenland, with only a couple of small towns on it (and some more abandoned US military facilities) wouldn’t have much of a place to host them. Maybe they could get located at the facility at Pituffik. But that would be quite odd — welcoming a defending force inside the only military facility of the nation who supposedly wants to take control of the island.

Now here’s the rub. MAYBE psychopaths have realized the ludicrousness of all the actual numbers, and are constructing that mental model that will get people to hate Trump even more (a TDS viral accelerator, as it were.). But maybe not. Maybe it’s actually just a great angle for a relational disruption and chaos strategy across the board, for a non-event that is really a non-event. No one’s asking what a takeover of Greenland by the US military would do on anything but paper — which is actually the critical aspect of it. Declaration of Greenland being a US protectorate would be critical in telling Russia and China that weird stuff is not going to be tolerated. And it also likely will put other threats to bed preemptively.

Like China and Russia drilling for oil! Or mining for rare earth minerals. That must be the real reason for Trump’s obsession! And with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Greenland is really going to be green Real Soon Now.

And now we can see the exploitation of innumeracy once again. If you go out, once again, and ask folks how long it’s going to take to melt all the ice on Greenland, you’ll hear answers like ’20 years’. Or ’50 years’. Because we’re approaching the point of Global Boiling!

But once you jump off the Great Dichotomy — that the planet is going to become uninhabitable in 50 years — the numbers really don’t add up. Our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says 1000-10,000 years to melt all of Greenland’s ice. Big error bars (not that this matters) but basically we don’t know. And I could say a whole bunch of math-y stuff how all this is based on some linear model, and so on. Blah, blah, blah.

“But it doesn’t matter!” screams the psychopathic contingent. “Over 100 GIGATONS of ice a year melt off of Greenland!” Whenever you hear gigatons, you better be scared. No mention of the context for any of this — Greenland ice volume (note wikipedia measures volume, but loss rates are in mass, to confuse people)

2.9 million cubic kilometers = 2.9  x 10^15 cubic meters = 2.9 x 10^18 kg  (more or less). And reality is lost in the fact that 100 GT is really not very much at all.

And no one has any interest in popping down a level to what it would take to actually mine sites in Greenland. Greenland has 1 mine for anorthosite — a material that can be used for high temp construction material, and also a potential for titanium. Mining someplace like Greenland is hellishly hard — you gotta really want what’s under the ground — and the odds of it being accessible without a ton of ice on it is just not realistic at all. I’ve worked with a company in Labrador with my students. It was just a fun thought exercise on what do you do with all that snow you’ve got to deal with.

But psychopaths are not going to have a problem exploiting any of the ignorance around actually producing results from mining. Nor do they need to know the veracity of any potential claims. When your goal is chaos, that’s what you gear your training data for.

Does that mean there are no psychopaths with a conscious plan of manipulation on any of the basics of Greenland? Of course not. There might be a couple of smarties out there who have figured out what the public doesn’t know. But the minute the gigaton numbers come marching out, you don’t really need much. The psychopathic LLM kicks into overdrive, looks for hot spots (war! money! monomaniacal Trump!) and rapidly creates contemporaneous messages to support the bullshit. Chaos is the point, after all. There will be no epiphanies after the chaos campaign falls apart. It will just be on to the next point that might work.

And no one’s talking about how an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure. That’s the whole metacognition thing — knowing what you don’t know. We’re just downstream of yanking Maduro out of Venezuela because of decades of neglect about dealing with a regime that allowed Hezbollah to produce long-range drones in our backyard, give a controlling interest in oil to China, and participate in poisoning our citizens with fentanyl and cocaine. Maybe a little preemptive, judicious action in another hot spot of potential global contention against real adversaries – what X mutual, @vtchakarova Velina Tchakarova calls the DragonBear (Russia and China together) might not be so stupid. In fact, it might be really smart.

But the psychopaths come out, with their magic blanket of fear. And here we are.

If there’s a remedy for any of this, just remember. The math isn’t complicated. But you gotta get your thought process to slow down, and say “huh” a lot. That dissipates that innumeracy cloud faster than any statistics class. Repeat after me: “that don’t make NO sense!”

P.S. I wrote another piece on innumeracy and COVID here. It’s quite good. COVID was driven by psychopathic manipulation of innumeracy. And it ain’t gonna get fixed just by taking another statistics course. I did go out and do a casual ‘man on the street’ sampling on what people believed the death rate from COVID was — most people said ~ 10%. Actual rate, just for your edification, was ~.05%. Typical respiratory winter numbers.

H/T to pal Joe Biello, who I work on climate issues with. Thanks, Joe!

Psychopathic Manipulation — A Case Study

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Sunset, along US 95 in the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho

As I write this, a huge breaking wave is coming on to politics across blue states in the US. Nick Shirley, a 23 year old Youtube Influencer, posted a 42 minute video profiling nonexistent day care centers ostensibly run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, MN. The video is great in that it is so facile — Nick and an activist named David merely matched disbursement records with visits to the actual day care sites, and witnessed no activity. The link is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8AulCA1aOQ

Estimates of the fraud run into the tens of billions of dollars. But how does this happen? We’ll talk about a different, deep historic timeline — food and clean water charities around both the US and the world. And nope — this is not some “fact finding” kind of piece. My goal is to describe the dynamics of how people get taken in by psychopaths.

Consider the controversy around the current SNAP program in the United States. SNAP, hooked with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card, is how people enrolled in government food aid, can buy food from all sorts of food providers, and is just a renaming of the food stamp program. Eligibility is not hard to prove — almost anyone with a little bit of determination can get food aid. When I have students in financial distress, I often send them to sign up for the program.

But the program goes way back — to the Great Depression. Originally, food aid was founded in 1934 as a tool to help farmers get rid of agricultural surplus, but then evolved into the Food Stamp program that reached some form of functional maturity during the Great Society years of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 shifted from surplus reduction to hunger prevention. And though that shift did occur, it still leaned into agricultural surplus. My grandmother, who had been poor most of her life (she was a character) would always be first in line when the semi truck of excess “government cheese” showed up in town. It was actually really good.

In 2008, food stamps were rebranded through the SNAP act, and the paper stamps were replaced with electronic debit cards. The program was expanded once again during the COVID years of 2020-2022, and included emergency allotments, as well as online grocery purchases.

The point of these programs was to eradicate hunger — and now one gets into the arena of manipulation. We are still bombarded constantly with charities talking about hunger relief. At some level, one can at least believe the story of hunger overseas — we aren’t there, though studies have shown that the majority force of hunger around the world is war. But in the United States, we still hold food drives and such. How does hunger still occur?

Or does it?

If you are advocating for any program, clearly one of the easiest is hunger eradication. Hunger, and especially, the IDEA of hunger has been a standard memetic cudgel as long as authoritarian governments have been in existence. And as the history shows, it is one of the oldest government programs in continuous existence. If someone confronts you on your charity, no one wants to be the one arguing FOR hunger. In fact, the strength of the virtue of the mental model associated with hunger is so powerful, there’s few humans in the United States who will argue for any reduction in these programs.

And the minute you have that level of mental model solidity, you have a tool for program growth — as well as an attractant for psychopaths looking to run a grift using hunger as the primary issue. Recent attempts by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to even reduce the items allowable to be purchased using EBT cards – namely soda pop and candy- have caused a firestorm. As of January 1, 2026, only 18 states will eliminate purchases of these items with SNAP benefits.

Further, in our day of decentralized media, the reduction in purchase range by SNAP has spawned hundreds of videos of people complaining about the changes. Obese people are on social media, complaining how their reduction of benefits will mean they can no longer get their nails done, or buy other luxuries. Reduction in SNAP benefits and the effects on other items purchased have not been formally studied — but dips in the luxury tennis shoe market indicate potential linkages.

And grocers are concerned — these are the legitimate ones — that reductions in SNAP benefits will cut into their profits. None of them want to comment on any of this — Walmart’s SNAP sales are around 1/4 of its grocery sales. But individuals abusing SNAP benefits as a crime is hard to prove.

More easy to look at another program in the current spotlight for fraud associated with food aid programs — the Feeding our Future program in Minnesota. Same memetic structure.

Federal prosecutors allege that between 2020–2022, FOF and affiliated operators:

  • Claimed to serve tens of thousands of children per day at hundreds of sites that did not exist or barely operated.
  • Submitted fabricated meal counts, invoices, and attendance logs.
  • Used shell companies to launder reimbursement money.
  • Spent funds on luxury homes, cars, jewelry, travel, and overseas transfers.

The thing that is interesting about this is how poorly covered by the media AND government it is. Psychopathic manipulation of taboos — in this case, anything with helping ostensibly alleviating hunger– is off-limits. There’s a record of scant media coverage on all of these going back decades. Yet only in the current political turmoil do we actually get a sense that these types of things that spawn massive corruption are in play. And in the case of Feeding our Future, it’s chock-a-block full of Somali operators on the front end. Who, of course, happen to be Black. So now you have both the immigrant AND racial angle. Hunger, immigrants, Blacks. A psychopathic model trifecta.

How can we understand this from a systems perspective? Psychopaths co-opt a mental model about a societal problem (often one buried deep within the human psyche) , launch a dollar harvesting/diversion scheme around that scheme, and then, if the scheme is discovered, use both the dominant mechanism as a “narcissistic shield” or “moral racket” (if we’re not allowed to continue doing this, children will starve!) as well as a rear-guard action (You are all racists because the people perpetrating the scheme are black!)

Clean Water Around the World

One of the most vexing problems I’ve struggled with in deciding to help various student groups over the years is the ‘clean water’ problem. And inevitably, requests for donations also show up in my mailbox — arguing for this scheme or that for bringing drinking water to the unwashed masses. Often these schemes are in esoteric locations, often in Africa to places I’ve never been. I’ve spent significant time in 40+ countries, and not just in conference hotels. So I have some reasonable perspective on what life is like in the various parts of the Third World and Fourth World that most people would never go in their lifetimes.

What I’ve seen is that people all over the world, even in the poorest places, always seem to be able to afford three things — cell phone minutes (I have yet to visit a place where cell phones are not ubiquitous, and I’ve been to some crazy places) , sugary or savory snacks in small packages, and bottled water. I have a modest reluctance to pronounce this, but I’m increasingly skeptical that there is a drinking water problem anywhere outside a war zone. I have yet to visit a true Stone Age venue, where there are no small kiosks selling these things.

And if you focus in on water, this is, like it or not, the de facto solution for drinking water around the world. No mother is going to take water out of some sand trap contraption that engineers specializing in Third World development and give it to her baby. It just ain’t happening, unless there is some major crisis.

And once again, outside of war zones, various NGOs have swarmed over all those sub-Saharan countries, with various well-drilling and water production schemes. Nothing is new under the sun. My own university had a revolving door with Malawi and a series of classic dysfunctional development schemes there. My favorite was drilling a well for a cabbage grower. Various development agents came in, and drilled a well. Initially, the cabbage grower was elated. Instead of growing 10 cabbages a year, he could now grow 100! The development folks left, and came back the next year.

How had he fared? He was weeping. “Last year, I had 10 cabbages, but all got sold. Now I have 100 cabbages. But I have no way to get them market, and most of them are now rotting. And I did make a little more money, but I started drinking. My two wives told me that they would not live with an alcoholic, so they left me.”

There was a similar story about people in Malawi growing rice. Except people in Malawi don’t grow rice. Rice requires flooded paddies. But flooded paddies then create mosquitoes. And mosquitoes create malaria. And so on.

The point of all this is now we have another perfect psychopathic mental model that can be used by outside forces to run yet another Long Con. You have an issue everyone is familiar with, that has been around forever. You are asked for money — who could refuse money for clean water for kids? You cannot protest — you will be condemned for a lack of virtue. Meanwhile, maybe no wells get drilled. Mothers are still feeding their kids bottled water. And you are threatened with a moral racket, or narcissistic shield if you even question.

The pattern is clear.

Alternatives

Give locally, and know the people you live with. Grounding validity is always the answer. I give no more to organizations with fungible accounting categories.

How Psychopaths Weaponize Free Speech

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cascade Mountains, WA — Winter is Coming

One of the craziest things that’s happened in the last six or so years is the blatant injection of speech control by the Left in all aspects of what I’ve called Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It is the story and framing of a “moral racket” to bully others into silence, and that if you follow the narrative thread, your society will collapse. “If you say that, not only are you evil, but we will ostracize you from society AND kill the baby panda. And it will be ALL YOUR OWN FAULT.”

The technique works best when utilizing sexual taboos, which the psychopaths are allowed to discuss in celebration. But if you protest, you are (pick one or all) a bigot, a racist, and so on. And you better shut up.

No better example could be found than when Sam Brinton, former undersecretary in the Department of Energy, in charge of nuclear waste disposal went on various tours promoting his kink, which I can’t quite characterize. It involves being surrounded by other men dressed up in leather dog costumes, complete with butt plug tails inserted into their poopers.

Brinton was later dismissed for a particularly pernicious habit he had of stealing other people’s luggage off airport baggage carousels, then going home and wearing the dresses in public.

But while Brinton was in play, we, the public, were subjected to what I’d call “Walsh’s Progression” (credit to Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire) regarding all this psychopathic nonsense. We were supposed to Tolerate this reprehensible behavior, followed by Accept this as normative, then forced to Celebrate this as somehow adding to the modern cultural zeitgeist, leading to Normalization, and ending, of course, in Coercion and Punishment if you can’t follow the script.

All these types of manipulations depend on the psychopathic entity violating taboos and norms in society, followed by a pronouncement that only they are allowed to discuss this. The only allowable response across society is sycophancy. What they are promoting is usually, by their standards, some ostensibly necessary sexual deviancy. Why does it have to center around that deviancy, in the larger psychosocial picture? Because it mainstreams a channel for sexual abuse, mostly directed at children, who once traumatized, will then increase the odds of them developing a personality disorder and joining the ranks. It’s a combo psychosocial control/memetic reproductive act.

And that’s why it’s necessary to be done in public, especially publics containing children. It simply doesn’t work behind closed doors.

To repeat — psychopaths take taboo subjects, self-identify, demand acceptance and then use these to shut down broader debate. And because these subjects are ALREADY taboo in the larger cultural zeitgeist (call it polite society), it’s not that hard a task.

Let’s take another example — illegal immigration. While LEGAL immigration policy is a debatable good, illegal immigration is truly a consolidated blight on society. They are not the same. Illegal immigration often involves human trafficking. And human trafficking is inordinately profitable, both for the Mexican cartels that pipeline people into the US, as well as the various entities in the US exploiting the labor.

How does this work? Let’s say you are a contractor bidding a federal contract. You must bid this contract at prevailing wage rates, or it will be rejected. But if you fill your workforce with illegal aliens, you can likely pay these people half or less that same wage rate, resulting in a windfall for you. This becomes money that both you and the cartels can pump into the political machine to “look the other way” in whatever regional market you occupy.

Now pour on the psychopathic messaging. “These are hardworking families (growing dope in Ventura County.) “If you don’t support them, you’re a racist!” and so on. One pours on the messaging because there is an extensive web of government support services that are also profiting off the existence of these people, with housing, food and medical assistance, all part of the associated moral racket. “They are only looking for a better life, you monster!” And unless you’re made of sterner stuff (like me) you’re going to wilt.

Folks on the other side can’t even open their mouths regarding the very immediate impact to their own circumstance — especially in adjacent, poor communities. In the Scandinavian countries, rapes increased some 50% from baseline with the importation of migrants from Africa. And heaven forbid if you actually discuss the demographics of the illegal migrants — mostly young men in their 20s and 30s, and the inevitable characteristics of letting in an uneducated army into your country, while housing and feeding them. It’s all booby-trapped with psychopathic taboos designed to make you keep your mouth shut.

It’s even difficult for me, writing in the abstract, to imagine using the very real argument that my friends’ daughters will increase the chance of them being raped by allowing this illegal wave in.

That’s the power of psychopathic taboos.

One can also see the extreme reaction from the Left on this issue against Donald Trump. Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation czar, attacks the psychopaths head on. Instead of deferring to their manipulation of taboos, he confronts them with stories of direct experience. But because the majority of our mainstream media has abandoned their own ethics, or are willingly supporting the psychopaths, there is no amplification.

And, as with all things psychopathic, in the v-Meme space, the psychopaths take any dissent, as well as detail, and shove it down into the macerator of reality. The only “appropriate” response is conformity. And that requires relational disruption and loss of agency — THE key psychopathic identifiers — for all adjacent actors. And so the folks responding to the use of these psychopathic taboos march down into Tribal v-Meme knowledge structures of myths about past immigration. Nuance or reasonable policy is not acceptable.

Do the psychopaths know they’re doing this? I think the ones at the top do. But much of this turns into an emergent cascade — once the masters at the top, interested in some strange brew of anarchy, chaos and low level control, set the tune, the local dynamics of relationships comes into play. Understanding the complex web of both illegal actors, and legal institutions in perpetuation of all this strains the brains of all but a few of us.

Diabolical.

What’s the remedy? The modest thing is resist the psychopath’s efforts to rename pathological behaviors into more palatable forms. Don’t use the language of the psychopath. Call illegal immigration “illegal immigration” — not undocumented workers. Do not use the phrase “children’s gender affirming care.” Call it child castration. You’ll see an immediate revulsion for describing these various things as they are. But if we cannot reclaim the language, we will see the psychopaths carry the day on the field.

Let’s get going.

Psychopathic Inversion and the Relational Devolution of the Left

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 6 Comments

Reno at Night

It’s not exactly a secret that I’ve been a social activist, almost completely unpaid, my entire life. It started back in 1989, after I moved out to Pullman and became involved with the environmental movement. I fell under the tutelage of Leroy Lee, a Native American wannabe as close to being a Nez Perce Indian as one could be. Leroy was no Pretendian — but he was as ingratiated with both the Coeur D’alene and Nez Perce tribes. And he decided I was smart, which has always been a curse, and enlisted me in helping him with what turned into the Phantom Forest scandal. Leroy was a timber stand examiner, and worked in the woods measuring exactly how much actual timber was present on both private and mostly National Forest land. So he drug me along as he compiled damning evidence on the US Forest Service, showing that they had kept two sets of books regarding sustainability of that resource — one inflated, to justify increased cutting. And one actual — because in the end, the USFS had to sell that timber. I was a protege — not an architect. But I learned a lot from Leroy, who had intuited that I would go on to continue his work.

Leroy died young — 18 years ago, but I still remember him fondly.

And that launched my own benighted career — defending beautiful places that no one knew, and no one really cared about. Most people, when it comes to saving forests, sort the world into what they can see from the highway. And if there’s a “beauty strip” — a row of trees that blocks the view of clearcuts from the road, most will never question any of it. Even in this latest round of dealing with Donald Trump and ostensibly renewed calls for more logging on National Forests (most people don’t even understand that National Forests are NOT National Parks — they can and are logged) I’ve found that most people, even while professing care about ecological integrity, haven’t the foggiest what that means. Even professional environmental activists have fallen into line defending agencies I literally spent decades fighting.

But that’s the memetics for you. We’re in the middle of a war, as I’ve written here, between elites and counter-elites, and the elites long ago managed to figure out, regardless of whatever the noble cause was, to hack the institutional income stream from whatever the charitable, front-and-center projection du jour. I’m a huge fan of Mike Benz and Jennica Pounds, a woman that goes by DataRepublican on X. They have deconstructed the NGO-Industrial complex better than anyone. And along with the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) have been responsible for bringing the pain to the deep, ingrained corruption on the Left. None of this doesn’t mean that a mirroring corruption wasn’t already present on the Right. But I was one of the people that at least thought that, by being a Lefty, I was on the right side of these large issues.

Along the way, I started writing for the local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News — a bi-weekly op-ed column under the tagline ‘Reality-Based Lefty’. I have, and still do believe that local news reporting is essential in smaller communities. I’ve seen various studies that show local newspapers profoundly damp down the corruption in governance . So as much as I believe anything coming out of the academy nowadays, I, once again, thought I was working on the right side.

I had written at least 23 years of columns until I quit in 2023. The column made me recognizable, and notable in the communities of Moscow and Pullman. My administrators at the university notably also hated the fact that I was writing, and found various and sundry ways to persecute me (bogus ethics violations, etc.) for writing it. Academic administrations are about power and control — and that matters in small, university communities. And though I’ve always been excellent in my job (raising money, publishing, blah, blah, blah) as university governance has declined, my ability to speak has also gone down. I’ve enjoyed some reprieves dependent on the university president, and WSU has had some good ones. But my colleagues and lower level factotums memetically have had an impossible time believing that a professor could or should speak with an independent voice.

As far as external audiences, I’ve had to deal with more than my fair share of potential directed violence. During the Cove-Mallard campaign, my phone was very likely tapped by the FBI. At various public hearings, I had other forces of the timber industry threaten me. And I went toe-to-toe with millworkers and loggers as well. I’ve written about some of this in my book, Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater, which was published in 1998 by WSU Press. At least at the time, I couldn’t have been so far out of the blessings of the university hierarchy.

What I found with folks that worked in the woods was that, while they had problems, and would threaten me, if I also matched their approach, and talked to them, they would back down and we would talk. There’s a certain pattern to the dance when someone threatens to kick your ass — they step forward, and yell. And you better step forward, chest-to-chest as well. Fear doesn’t wear well. But then they would inevitably step back, and you would talk. Mill owners and timber magnates were worse. But the industry just wasn’t, and isn’t about killing people for their political views. That’s not true for all natural resource industries — I’ve always told people I’d never mess with Basque sheep farmers (those guys are nuts). They’d kill you at the drop of a hat. Maybe it’s just the fact they’re the only humans alive still pretty much descended from Cro-Magnons. But while there was indeed tons of political skulduggery in the timber/USFS game, murder is just not in the cards. Or I’d be dead.

I took a hiatus after Clinton’s Roadless Initiative got passed. We had managed to move off the table most of the remaining public wild country on National Forest ground (no roads) off the table. I had kids to raise, and I wanted to make change in the university landscape. So I became the Chair of the Faculty Senate — kind of like the elected president of the faculty — and went to work on the issues of the day, which mostly revolved around DEI. This led to me participating in hiring Elson Floyd, a black man, who turned out to be a narcissistic psychopath. He spent WSU into penury, and we’re still struggling financially from this. He also made sure to wreck my career in administration as well. He simply couldn’t tolerate having another powerful person in his orbit. That’s a longer story in itself that will have to wait until retirement. I also got divorced, and ended up in a protracted struggle with the mother of my two sons, who was aided and abetted by a school system, which calling it corrupt would be mild. It was painful as hell, but it did yield profound insights into how our country has gotten the problems that it has. Short version — we didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not gonna get out of here overnight either.

And then came COVID. I was involved in the ramp-up to the lockdowns and masking, and I’ve written extensively about all of it, as well as my eventual discovery that it was all a farce — a diabolical one that still goes on today.

And along the way I wrote my column in the local newspaper. I was, at the first, earnestly attempting to communicate with the public about civic issues while hewing to the mainline science. This, though, went sideways during COVID, when it became obvious that the powers-that-be were deliberately lying for lots of reasons — the largest being what I named Elite Risk Minimization. Elite Risk Minimization is the psychopathic manipulation of public interventions, using the force of government, to minimize any perceived risk elites have to their well-being. It is absolutely anti-empathetic, and it utilizes other ensconced elites (like professors at universities) to propagate bullshit beliefs. The guiding principle became “if it saves one life” — as long as that life belongs to an elite. If you’re poor, your life can be wrecked — and many were. It’s a well-worn story how elites sat at home and had food delivered to them, while ostensibly the poors wandered about waiting on them, dropping food in bags outside their doors while ostensibly subjecting themselves to clouds of the virus. Fortunately for the poors, the lethality of COVID turned out not to be true — though it is still BELIEVED to be true. Especially in small university communities like Moscow, ID.

And around the world, folks found out that all that science, and all that elite opinion, had largely been arbitrary, or manufactured by the folks paying the bill. Which, more often than not, turned out to be the taxpayer.

So I wrote about this. Initially, I wrote about the need to follow government mandates. But then the data came in, and I made some influential friends (hi, Jay, if you’re reading this!) and the whole fraud got grounded. So, I started out, initially kindly, and then more forcefully, telling elites in the two university towns that the rational case behind their affectations and hero worship of criminals like Tony Fauci was a crock of rotten fish.

And they responded. Boy, did they ever. I received all sorts of emails about “staying in my lane” and how I was killing people with my op-eds. I was screamed at in public, and ostracized. What was also unusual was that other citizen columnists for the paper, instead of covering their own viewpoints on issues, started writing libelous columns about me. The ethics of the op-ed game are pretty simple. You write your opinion, and then the public gets their shot. What was wild about all this was that it wasn’t just letter writers. It was other op-ed columnists. After three years of all of that, I decided it wasn’t worth the $25/column I was receiving. I figured the persistence of hate against me wasn’t worth it.

The residue from my column still haunts me. The latest incident happened just four days ago. A retired lab manager from a biology department at WSU, that I used to work on Democratic politics, while at the dog park where I run my border collies, picked up dog feces in a bag, came stomping and screaming at me about how irresponsible I was as a dog owner, and threw the feces at me. He then attempted to steal my dog. There were plenty of witnesses — I hang out with a bunch of, well, elderly ladies at the dog park, who are on my team. The perp didn’t leave until I called 911.

But even as he left, as I was running the calculation in my head on who exactly he was, he walked away with a smug grin. His point to be made, in a veritable community of elderly immiserators, was that there would never be a price I could pay to not be tormented by these people in public. Am I 100% sure it wasn’t just about the fact that my dog took a poop? Of course not. But if there’s been any theme in my life over the last four years, is that once you are declared an outcast in a Lefty community, you are fair game for whatever happens to you. And if that thing is evisceration, you may have a Greek chorus weeping for you on the sidelines. But no one will do a thing. You deserved it.

There’s a pattern here that’s worth noting, that I’ve seen over and over since Trump got elected — but was really in play during COVID as well. It plays into the whole Elite Overproduction thing I write about. If you piss off a logger in a logging community, they may threaten to kick your ass. But it’s a direct threat. You square off, size each other up, and then take your chances. The logger (or miner) isn’t counting on some institution to manipulate to change the circumstances. They know that they’re likely breaking the law to kick your ass, and they’ll end up having to explain this to the judge. But they’re functioning inside some rational understanding of an ordered society.

That is no longer true on the Left. When I’ve been assaulted — and it’s happened three times, full-on — the expectation of the person screaming at me/spitting on me/hurling a bag of dog shit at me is that, in their minds, they have functionally been deputized by society to punish me, and any institutional authority summoned would back them up. Ostracism is guaranteed. And because Trump is evil/a rapist/a criminal, they have decided that the rules of a civilized society no longer apply. At least to them — but in the case that I act (in all three cases of assault and battery, I had to passively absorb the abuse) I will be the one that the cops haul away.

This thought is not with rational merit. One of the problems with being a large, muscular human (I’m a big guy, though at 62, not as strong as I used to be) is that they also assume bias in the police, and after I literally break them, I will be the one to pay. Even if it’s obviously self-defense. When the person that was attempting to steal my dog was trying to clip a leash on her collar, I was very careful to not touch him, all the while yelling at him to stop. Witnesses, as I said, and another gentleman were on my side. But so certain he was of his righteousness — it was me, a local societal pariah — it never occurred to him that he would ever suffer any consequences. It’s fundamentally a pattern of psychopathic inversion — claiming self-victimhood as the tool to justify whatever cruelty they decide to mete out. Remember that the next time one of these psychopaths start talking about “the cruelty being the point” when talking about Donald Trump. They’re self-identifying and projecting one of the key behaviors they’re familiar with. And they get to be the judge.

This phenomenon is not just limited to me. There have been numerous other situations where various lefties acted out to disrupt events with no expectation of consequences. In March, a Republican Central Committee meeting in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, was disrupted by Teresa Borrenpohl, an official at North Idaho College and a Democratic candidate who was forcibly removed from the meeting by private security after disrupting the meeting. She claimed ‘free speech’, though she did not follow the rules of the hearing. While I can understand her actions, at some level, the bottom line once she was thrown out of the meeting was to demand reparations for not being allowed to continue to disrupt the meeting. She was the authority, and she would not tolerate the fact that a group of people might object to her declaring her authority illegitimate. Further, she made it abundantly clear that this was not an act of civil disobedience, where an entity breaks the law, fully expecting to face consequences. There would be no consequences – at least not for her, she informed the press, other than the Kootenai County Republicans paying her tribute. She controlled the morality of the event.

I was heavily attacked as well on Facebook after the event by many people by bringing up similar points. Many of the people on the FB thread know me personally and deeply. It was clear — any questioning of her moral authority would result in permanent ostracism. Some of the people on that thread were individuals who had also participated, or supported our own Civil Disobedience efforts. Clearly, at least in their minds, the rules have changed. As Lefties, they now embody the law, the judge, and the jury. As well as the executioner.

It is worth pausing for a minute and considering what is happening in communities, or rather tribes on the Left. And here’s the thing — Trump Derangement Syndrome is just a symptom. There has been an overall psychosocial v-Meme devolution on the Left. There is still some hanging onto higher-level narratives from Legalistic and Authoritarian v-Memes. But overall, the corpus has adopted a psychopathic perspective based on the psychological condition known as ‘splitting’ — where there’s a descent into black-and-white thinking, where only the current observer, as long as that observer is correctly tribally aligned, gets to decide on the veracity of any given situation. Tribal Taboos have been established (e.g. there will be no firing of any black official, regardless of their self-evident level of corruption) and they will not be broken. And if they are broken, it’s like an entire unraveling of worldview that takes place, instead of any attempt to relate a change of condition with society, or any functional integration of their worldview with what’s actually happening in current affairs. They are literally operating in a fantasy world of their own creation.

But it is reinforced through large-scale LARPing as social-justice warriors, or some other icks. No grounding necessary. The problem is that scales of their fantasies keep growing. As well as the concomitant gaslighting of the general public.

Core characteristics of much of this involve what I call ‘narcissistic shielding’ — where an ostensibly innocent, group-declared victim is moved into a position between the out-group and the psychopathic champion of the in-group. “Don’t approach, or I’ll be forced to shoot the baby panda!” to paraphrase Elon Musk. Agency goes to zero with the Lefties. But the result of that is that it’s all the suspect outsider’s fault. All my attackers were their own narcissistic shields — champions of virtue. And while they threatened physical violence to me, had I responded, they were absolutely sure that the institutions would have been on their side. One of the screamers in my three incidents was a women in a motorized wheelchair who took it on herself to accost me for saying wearing masks were B.S. She accused me of wanting to kill her family.

All the confused outsider sees is the results of psychopathic projection from the Lefty insider. And this projection is both constant, and relentless. Consider the current Russiagate situation. Trump was pathologized, largely by a cabal under ex-President Obama and Hillary Clinton, to be a Russian asset, controlled by Putin. This is now being revealed as a combination plot that refuses to die. But the Left still persists in projecting this ostensible lack of agency on Donald Trump, due to their judgment of (of course) his lack of moral character, as well as mental incontinence, through sophisticated advocates like Heather Cox Richardson, even while there is nary a peep about the fact that Democrats were propping up mental invalid Joe Biden for basically his entire term.

Some of this stems from mental deterioration from the aging of the Left’s core group, which seems to mostly consist of AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals) and men and women over the age of 65. I suspect some of this has to do with degenerate cognitive decline — as people age, unless they really work at it, they march back the cognitive development v-Meme ladder, becoming more and more tribal and authority-driven. Much of this seems also like schismogenesis — the creation of a self-image through negative reverse polarization. They must be the opposite of everything they hate about Trump, or else their own, fragile ego boundaries, decaying in the face of their own death, are shattered. It’s a reverse role of the stereotype of Uncle Bob showing up as the arch-conservative at Thanksgiving dinner. But it’s still emblematically characterized with a focus on Trump himself. The various policies, that are simply disastrous for society (like open borders, or masking small children) are conveniently shunted to the side. As they decay, they lose more and more sense for precise time, which then helps them construct Collapse Narratives, based around dubious moral principles, as well as policies only rejecting what is occurring, as opposed to creating alternate solutions that would even have measurable outcomes. The only thing uniting their worldviews is the desire for collapse.

From a neurogenic relational perspective, the Lefties are also moving back down the relational/agency development scale. If you’re not an Externally Defined expert/Tribal Elder, you can’t be listened to at all. And if you go against the drumbeat of dread, then you’re immediately scapegoated. Contrast that to my confrontations with the loggers. It started out Externally Defined (I was an environmentalist, they were timber workers) but over the course of our relationship, their view of me evolved. I became a person — with an independently generated relationship that was fundamentally data-driven. We had talked, and exchanged perspectives, which were likely never completely resolved. But I was still, at the end, a human. Contrast with the current crop on the Left. I know at the end of any conversation with a Lefty True-Believer I’m merely to be added to the list of people to be, at best, re-educated. Or put up against the wall. I gotta get my mind right.

An incredible example of this popped up in my FB feed. I encourage you to read the piece for yourself. A relatively famous Native American writer is condemning her fellow writers for not coming to her Struggle Session workshop, and directly faults one of the people that did come for leaving early. She freely admits that the framework was a Struggle Session. But simply cannot acknowledge that maybe the reason for why the various feminist authors did not show up was that they were just human. And busy. Her response is emblematic of collapsed egocentricism — which is itself a prime symptom of Axis II/Cluster B personality disorders.

And here’s the thing, folks. She did this publicly, in a regional magazine, to people who are her ALLIES. If these people ever manage to gain power again, you can imagine what they’ll do to apostates like me. We continually believe we cannot have a Chinese Cultural Revolution here. But I’m here to tell you that we can. These people are laying the groundwork for it. There are steps — devolution of relational development, followed by rigid appropriation of various orthodoxies, mixed in with no absolution possible.

I’ve had in-laws like this — and they were psychopaths. They are hiding behind the screen of a culture that has, what we believe, an intrinsic, if not invisible thesis of forgiveness. It is a core Christian philosophy. But what I’ve learned in my own life is that there are various rituals for you to confess your sins. However, at the end, you are not granted absolution for your ways, nor elevated for your transcendence. You have merely acceded to a guilty judgment against you. And now you must be punished. Preferably by execution. I’ve got stories.

Civilizationally, we’re in a tight spot. It is true that a lot of these people are literally aging out of the population. But they are exceptionally weak-minded. It’s also true that Lefties are also not reproducing at the rate that conservatives are, which, for all the problems the conservative movement has, it is fundamentally a Christian movement, which does have paths for redemption. Time will tell. But it is also time to start punishing with the judicial system those that break the law. They are not breaking the law with the expectation of societal elevation, as in the past with large civil disobedience campaigns. They are breaking laws expecting that their moral hegemony will dominate.

If you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. The clip below can happen here.