CARTOON: A Sane Explanation For The Insanity The West Is Experiencing
Are we all insane now? No, but in a hypernormalized world, we are well on the way. A whole new path is needed. Nothing is as it was and nothing that worked before will work now.
Cartoons by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
Responding to this new world of obscure manipulation with old tactics and fuzzy trust we can “vote our way” out of this is beyond naive: it is dangerous. It is lethal to all.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (5/30/25)
Every day dawns with a new US-funded obscenity. One morning it is a report of US/Israeli forces bombing a refugee center in a Gaza school. The next, a Gazan surgeon loses nine of her ten children in a bombing and her tenth and her husband were badly injured. Then the next morning there’s a report of the youngest Gazan social media influencer, an 11-year-old girl who advised other children how to survive and deal with their grief, was killed after the US/Israeli military bombed the family home.
And I want to be clear, these are all ‘US/Israeli’ war crimes. We provide the bombs, intelligence coordination, money, diplomatic cover and our bare ass to the Israeli and American Zionist Nazis.
And, given their unrelenting Holocaust of this time, yeees, the fascist Israelis and Zionists are Nazis. And with our full participation in genocide and giddy exile of innocents to foreign concentration and torture camps, the US government is Nazi as well.
With every day and every shredded Palestinian child, we spit on the graves and sacrifice of our World War II dead. We have become the very thing we opposed.
What have we become?
What will we become?
I don’t know, but I do know this country is forever changed. Going about my daily routine it can feel like nothing has changed. Then the latest US/Israeli war crime obscenity is reported and reality is shredded once again.
Joe Biden’s addled presidency and Donald Trump’s flickering-light mental collapse proves the people we thought were running things — the people elected to do so — are CLEARLY NOT running things. Nothing is as we are told and told to believe. We are in what has been called ‘hypernormalisation’; a post-truth, irrational, treacherous, enveloping shroud of deceit.
If there is to be any chance of surviving the trampoline jump to nuclear Armageddon, we must understand the reality of the post-truth world we are in. Responding to this new world of obscure manipulation with old tactics and fuzzy trust we can “vote our way” out of this is beyond naive: it is dangerous. It is lethal to all.
Set aside some time to watch the powerful 2016 BBC Adam Curtis documentary “HyperNormalisation”. I have posted the film trailer so you can get a taste of it, but — truly — the whole film is essential to watch. Both links are provided below.
We are far, far beyond a post-truth world. We are now in a brutal AI-manipulated post-reality world.
Are we all insane now? No, but in a hypernormalized world, we are well on the way. A whole new path is needed. Nothing is as it was and nothing that worked before will work now. The first step is to understand the reality we face.
Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit!
‘Hypernormalization’ — Soviet-Era Concept Of When Everything In Life Feels Broken…Yet Oddly Normal
It’s reading an article about hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?
By Adrienne Matei
The Guardian (5/22/15)
In January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.
Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.
“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”
“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.
First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.
What makes dysfunction so dangerous is that we might simply learn to live with it. But understanding hypernormalization gives us language – and permission – to recognize when systems are failing, and clarifies the risk of not taking action when we can.
The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.
“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.
Within 48 hours, Harfoush’s video accrued millions of views. (It currently has slightly fewer than 9m.) It spread in “mom groups, friend chat circles, political subreddits, coupon communities, and even dog-walking groups”, Harfoush tells me, along with variations of: “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been feeling!” and “people tagging their friends with notes like: ‘We were just talking about this!’”
How hypernormalization has emerged in the US
The increasing instability of the US’s democratic norms has prompted these references to hypernormalization.
Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.
Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.
For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.
Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.
It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”
In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, the British film-maker Adam Curtis argued that Yurchak’s critique of late-Soviet life applies neatly to the west’s decades-long slide into authoritarianism, something more Americans are now confronting head-on. …
‘HyperNormalisation’ — A Documentary Of Our Times & World
We live in a world
Where the powerful
Deceive us
We know they lie
They know we know
They don’t care
We say we care
But we do nothing
And nothing ever changes
It’s normal
Welcome to the post-truth world
BBC (10/13/16)
Welcome to the post-truth world. You know it's not real. But you accept it as normal. But there is more out there. HyperNormalisation.
3-minute trailer
FULL BBC DOCUMENTARY: HyperNormalization: A Different Experience of Reality: Link to 2-hour, 46-minute video
DELUSION: Jewish Scholar Exposed The Shared, Reality-Free Twisted Mythology Of Israel & US
The Chris Hedges Report (5/28/25)
Chris Hedges talks to Professor Joan Scott about the late Amy Kaplan's cultural analysis of the US and Israel's mythological shared history, and how it has manufactured consent for Israel's atrocities over the years.
51-minute video
Our American Israel: The Story Of An Entangled Alliance
An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time.
In 1945, it was not inevitable that a global superpower emerging victorious from World War II would come to identify with a small state for Jewish refugees, refugees who at that time were still being turned away from the United States. How, then, did so many in America come to feel that the bond between it and Israel was historically inevitable, morally right, and a matter of common sense. Our American Israel reveals how Israel’s identity has long been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Beginning at the end of World War II with debates about the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and continuing through both the rise of evangelical Christian Zionism and the war on terror, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.
Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon; its military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.
In America today, Israel’s political realities pose profoundly difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that threaten to divide them.— Book summary
A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists On How To Stop Trump
At its core, emotional control is the narcissist’s primary goal: to protect a fragile sense of self-importance and entitlement by maintaining the grand illusion that supports it — without empathy for others.
By Jocelyn Sze
HuffPost (5/23/25)
The Trump administration is planning a June 14 military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army — and the president’s 79th birthday. When your sense of self-exaltation requires tanks, flyovers and up to $45 million for a birthday party, we’re no longer in the realm of cake and candles — we’re squarely in Criterion 1 of narcissistic personality disorder: “a grandiose sense of self-importance.”
To be clear, I can’t diagnose the president or any public figure without personal examination. But research shows that those in positions of power, especially in politics, are more likely to exhibit traits of grandiose narcissism. When narcissistic control seeps into leadership, it distorts truth, erodes trust and destabilizes institutions. The more we understand these dynamics, the better we can protect both the public and the health of our democracy.
As a clinical psychologist who works with trauma and narcissistic abuse, I see echoes of this dynamic every day in my therapy office. The same patterns that destabilize families destabilize democracies: along with the magnetic vision of the grandiose narcissist come denial, attack, reversal of blame and emotional chaos.
Authoritarian leaders, like narcissistic family members, rely on well-worn tactics to manufacture a psychological state of volatile uncertainty — where outcomes aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and unpredictable. This overwhelms the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare, keeping people mentally off-balance and easier to control. The good news: Awareness works like a vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity against further harm.
I think of one of my patients when she discovered her brother was terrorizing their elderly mother with violent threats and financial abuse. When she named the harm, he flipped the script — denying everything and accusing her of being unstable, all while fiercely protecting his “golden boy” image. Under family pressure to stay quiet, she spiraled into rumination. But armed with awareness and support, she stood firm. Like a broken record, she calmly named the harm until her boundary held. It came at a cost, but her brother was eventually removed from their mother’s home.
This same pattern shows up, magnified, on the political stage. Narcissistic control in government thrives on flipping the script and silencing watchdogs.
Authoritarian leaders, like narcissistic family members, rely on well-worn tactics to manufacture a psychological state of volatile uncertainty — where outcomes aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and unpredictable. This overwhelms the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare, keeping people mentally off-balance and easier to control. The good news: Awareness works like a vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity against further harm.
For another patient, “moving the goalposts” was the favored tactic of her ex-boyfriend to generate such volatility. He would make a demand (under the guise of “improving her”) and then change the expectation once it was met. In government, this looks like constantly reversing policies or public positions so that citizens, the media and allies remain unmoored.
“The White House has no idea what it’s doing on tariffs and keeps flip-flopping... Why even do an exemption if you’re going to reverse it soon?” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) posted on X on April 13, referring to more than 50 flip-flops on tariff policies since Trump’s inauguration.
Many dismiss these reversals as mere incompetence or poor strategy — and it’s true that narcissism is associated with more impulsive, error-prone decision-making. But anyone familiar with narcissistic abuse understands the deeper maneuver: Whether consciously or not, narcissists hold power by keeping others in a state of psychological whiplash. And it works.
Narcissist’s primary goal
At its core, emotional control is the narcissist’s primary goal: to protect a fragile sense of self-importance and entitlement by maintaining the grand illusion that supports it — without empathy for others. While it’s important to note that narcissistic pathology by no means equates to abuse, there are more aggressive versions that use confusion, despair and emotional bonds like loyalty to control how others think and feel, secure a constant flow of admiration or reactivity, shield themselves from shame and keep others attached — even against their best interests.
Of the dizzying array of tactics, perhaps the most effective is crisis manufacturing. The constant emergencies aren’t flukes — they’re by design. They keep everyone in survival mode, distracting from deeper issues and ensuring the narcissist stays at the center of attention and control. For my patients who have survived narcissistic abuse, it might be an explosive tantrum, a threat to seek full custody or a frantic late-night call about a (fabricated) mugging. On the national stage, it takes the form of rhetorical escalations, legal threats or emergency declarations designed to dominate the news cycle and overwhelm opposition.
The nervous system can only take so much. Fight (rage), flight (escape planning), freeze (paralysis), fawn (capitulation) and flop (hopelessness) are natural survival responses — but they also keep us stuck. Healing — in therapy and in democracy — begins by recognizing when we’re trapped in these states and learning how to return to grounded, organized action.
Identify and unwind the patterns
In my work, I help people identify and unwind these patterns. They begin to understand they’re not just anxious or distracted for no reason — they’re reacting to prolonged psychological coercion. The same is true for societies under narcissistic leadership. This isn’t just politics. It’s millions of nervous systems in fight-or-flight mode.
One of my patients responds to her mother’s barrage of abusive texts — a stream of accusations, victim posturing, theatrical crises and financial demands — by reaching for her flashcards. Each card is labeled with a tactic she’s learned to spot: Deny, Attack, Play the Victim, Perform the Hero, Create Crisis. Instead of being wrung out like a towel — her body drained of clarity by her mother’s volatility — she names each tactic as it arises. Naming gives her distance. It helps her stay calm, grounded and in control of her response. The unpredictable becomes predictable. That’s what psychological immunity looks like in real life.
I’ve watched many patients wrestle their way out of the fog of narcissistic control. It doesn’t happen all at once. …
Donald thumps his MAGA Bros harder…
Ten Obscene Sleeper Provisions In Trump’s Budget Bill That Target YOU
Yet more horrors are hidden in the fine print.
By Robert Kuttner
The Prospect (5/23/25)
The headlines in the budget reconciliation bill that passed the House by one vote early Thursday morning are well known: massive tax cuts for the rich financed by crippling program cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, raising the federal debt by $3.3 trillion over a decade, and in turn spooking bond markets. But a lot of other mischief is buried in the fine print. Here are ten of the worst:
Crippling Courts. The bill, hiding behind the premise that it is an appropriations measure, prohibits any funds from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. This is designed to enable Trump and his officials to continue defying court orders. It is almost certainly unconstitutional—if courts have the nerve to say so.
Bonus for the Tax Prep Industry. The Biden administration sponsored a Direct File measure to allow taxpayers to save money by using a free IRS tool to file their tax return rather than paying commercial tax preparers. The program is now available to taxpayers in 25 states. The reconciliation bill repeals the program.
More Savaging of Migrants. The bill adds $45 billion to build immigration jails—more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget. The bill would allow indefinite detention of immigrant children. It also adds several fees intended to harass. The measure charges families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border, and a person seeking asylum will have to pay an “application fee” of at least $1,000.
Terminating the Tax Status of Nonprofits. The reconciliation text gives the administration the power to define nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations” and expedite the ending of their tax status. This is ostensibly directed against pro-Palestinian groups, but could be used to suppress the free speech and activism of climate organizations and others.
Blocking State Regulation of AI. The bill prohibits any state or subdivision from passing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.” It requires the repeal of any such laws already on the books. According to The Lever, the language could be stretched to block efforts by local governments to regulate private equity firms and other landlords using AI software to jack up rents.
Gutting the Estate Tax. As if the current exemptions were not enough, the bill raises the no-tax floor to a staggering $15 million for single people and $30 million for couples in 2026. So a couple could leave $29.99 million to their heirs, tax-free. As recently as 2001, 2.1 percent of estates paid some tax. With this change, the percentage falls to less than 0.08 percent.
Weakening the Child Tax Credit. The bill nominally increases the current Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $2,500 per child. But it also lowers the eligibility income threshold, making millions of children ineligible. The bill also excludes from the credit 4.5 million children who have a parent without a Social Security number but who pays taxes with a tax identification number. These children are predominantly U.S. citizens with an immigrant parent.
Expanding School Vouchers. The bill gives $20 billion in the form of tax credits to donors who give money to voucher schools. It also creates a tax shelter from paying capital gains taxes to donors who give appreciated stock to voucher schools. These two provisions amount to a direct federal subsidy to voucher schools using wealthy individuals as a pass-through. This government support for voucher schools comes at a time when Department of Education support for public schools is being slashed.
Stealth Cuts in the Affordable Care Act. The bill allows tax credits that subsidize ACA premiums to expire at the end of 2025. The result will be that out-of-pocket costs for insurance under the ACA will become more expensive and millions of people will lose coverage.
And … Support for Gun Silencers. Buried deep in the bill is a provision that repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers, which have no lawful purpose other than concealing shootings.
Most of these measures violate the principles of the budget reconciliation progress, which holds that reconciliation is limited to budget and spending and that ordinary legislation is not permissible. Many senators are unhappy with the House bill, and the Senate rules on germaneness are tighter, thanks to the Byrd Rule, which holds that “extraneous” matters may not be included in a budget bill. As the House bill heads for the Senate, the circus will continue.
But the bill will likely pass with most of the cuts intact. And as the unpopular cuts bite, the Republican Party must be held responsible in the court of public opinion.
Link to story and 50-minute audio
"Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it."
— Plato
So TRUE ! !
i would love to see a president in my life that is anti-Zionist