SUMMARY: In this post, we explore how Trump has systematically replaced core American values—such as belief in democracy and equality—with his own self-serving narratives through a process termed menticide. By normalizing lies and exploiting the existing racism and misogyny within his base, he has kept supporters in a state of turmoil, making them susceptible to increasingly outrageous claims. This fearmongering has led to a complete erosion of democratic principles, with his followers more invested in personal loyalty to Trump than the greater good of the nation. Ultimately, we reflect on how America has transitioned from a nation of integrity to one of deception.
KEY WORDS: Election 2024, Menticide, Mass Psychosis, Waves of Terror, Democracy, Narcissistic Delusion, Lying, Normalization, Arnold Palmer
COMMENTARY: Why do you think that Trump continues to poll so well when he is so clearly unqualified to ever hold office again?
Recently, the Old Felonious Authoritarian Rapist Traitor (Old FART) said that the enemies from within were more dangerous than Russia and China. He continued by saying that he might could use the US military within the US borders against US citizens that he deemed enemies from within. And, then, he names two of them Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as prime targets.
Such unAmerican rhetoric should disqualify him from candidacy. His party should disown him. The American people should abandon him. He should be shunned and banned from any type of public space, yet FiveThirtyEight has him within 1.8 points of Harris, and Republican politicians still support his candidacy.
Here’s how Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, responded to CNN’s Jake Tapper after he saw the video of Trump’s remarks and heard Tapper read quotes of them, “I do think that you are misinterpreting and misrepresenting his thoughts.”
Youngkin had, literally, just heard video of Trump saying, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics… it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” And, he says, you’re misrepresenting or misinterpreting the Old FART’s thoughts?
How is it possible?!? How is it possible for Youngkin to go on national television and tell such a bald-faced transparent lie? How did we as the American people come to accept such behavior from our politicians?
How did we go from George Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie. I cut down that cherry tree,” to Jamoke Dumbass maintaining that there was a peaceful transfer of power in 2020? How did we go from a nation of George Washingtons to a nation of lying sniveling Donald Trumps?
The Mechanics of Menticide
In a word, menticide. We’ve watched it happen to ourselves in real time. We’ve watched as the Old FART has replaced our normal beliefs and behaviors with his own self-serving ideas by systematically assaulting our collective psyche. Joost Meerloo outlined the systematic assault in his book, Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.
Let’s look at how Trump has taxidermied our national character filling it with narcissistic grievance and moral rot.
Lying Liars Normalizing Lying
First, he’s normalized lying by the sheer number of lies that he’s told. He is the world’s most prolific liar, and it seems only to be getting worse. His incessant fabrications render fact-checking ineffective; instead of meaningful discourse, we find ourselves arguing over the latest Trumpian absurdity. It’s less of dishonesty being a disqualifying character trait and more of a game of owning the libs.
The MAGA base jumped on board early. They were all too willing and eager to accept Trump’s racist misogynistic lies because they served their own base instinct of how the world should be and both are essentially lies in and of themselves. From there, it was easy to turn that baseline of racism and misogyny into a constant fear of racial and feminist upheaval and change, of deeply held grievance about missing out on the “American dream” because liberals insisted the lazy undeserving takers be ushered to the head of line before them.
This level of fear and loathing in America ushered in what Carl Jung called “psychic epidemics” or mass psychosis, a state when belief in alternate realities, madness, becomes normalized. Human beings evolved so narcissistic psychopaths could exploit and reshape our cultural belief systems by targeting our existing vulnerabilities.
Mass Psychosis Makes it Easier to Believe the Lies
Mass psychosis is the social phenomenon in which an entire population begins to believe in delusional ideas that are no longer based in reality. It’s how a person gifted with $400 million real live dollars is able to declare bankruptcy six real live times and still be thought of as a real live successful business person and not as a real live serial grifter. It’s how people believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and not that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election.
Trump’s lies are a double-edged sword. People find themselves believing them because (a) they want to — they appeal to their baser racist and misogynistic instincts — and (b) the lies are terrifying. Trump started out with Mexico sending rapists and murderers to our country, which evolved to migrant caravans filled with jihadists carrying ebola wanting to rape our fathers and behead our dogs, and now we’ve arrived at the crown of creation — immigrants who are eating our cats and dogs and turning the entire country into 1980’s Detroit.
When people are have lived with a constant flood of outrage and vitriol for nine years, the rational parts of their brains have been softened up with gallons cortisol and other neurotransmitters. It has rendered them, literally, unable to think straight. They will now believe anything that Trump tells them no matter how absurd or contradictory, and they’ve developed a preference for simplistic black-and-white explanations for complex problems.
Waves of Terror Wash Away Reality
We’ve now arrived at the climax of Hitler’s Fascist Propaganda Playbook: Waves of Terror. A period of intense fear is instilled through the use of lies accusing a targeted group of committing atrocities, which is then followed by a brief period of calm, which is then followed by another period of intense but worser fear using even more lies accusing the same targeted group of committing even worser atrocities. It is like the proverbial frog in the gradually heating pot of water.
Trump has had the unlikeliest of allies on his journey to waves of terror, climate change. The incredible storms that have battered the southeastern states are a perfect example. We can barely catch our breathe after one once-in-a-century natural disaster strikes before the next once-in-a-century natural disaster strikes.
We’re at the point where Trump spews incoherence for ninety minutes while his audience walks out on him, and it’s a “normal” campaign speech that the MSM has to work overtime to impose some kind of sense on. He is now cursing openly and frequently on stage, making references to the genitalia of Arnold Palmer, and it’s just a joke like you might hear at any drunken party.
Trump has gotten us to replace our belief in democracy, that all people are created equally, and the peaceful transfer of power with his own narcissism. We are now on the verge of electing him to another term BECAUSE he is threatening to use the US military against Congress people and citizens, to set up concentration camps and deport millions of people, to de-naturalize naturalized citizens, to let women bleed to death because we refuse them medical treatment, abandon our traditional allies in favor of our totalitarian enemies, to overturn our economic order by imposing ridiculous tariffs and defaulting on our national debt.
It’s like we are living in a horrifying sit com, as if Fellini met Norman Leer and they made “West Right-Winger.”
We have two weeks until Election Day. We have two weeks to defeat the man with the feculent touch and stop him from turning us all into a turd at midnight on 5 November.
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This image was found on AZ Quotes using a DuckDuckGo Creative Commons License image search.
The Psy of Life 
Excellent Post. The mass psychosis is terrifying to me, probably more than any other aspect of this dangerous man. I’m voting for the return of sanity.
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Thank you for the kind words, D. It is much appreciated.
The mass psychosis-waves of terror thing is terrifying. They explain why Trump has been so successful and how to stop him… if we have the stomach for it. The only way to eliminate the damage done by mass psychosis is to end the constant turmoil and stress that the deceitful rhetoric Trump is spewing. Unfortunately, political speech is well-protected by the courts. The courts say we have to endure someone knowingly, willingly, and cynically lying for their own political gain and to damage our Constitution and democracy. We can’t even bring someone up on charges and let a court sort it out. We just have to let Fox News, D. Trump, and the Republicans lie lie lie and monger all of the fears.
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Jack
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The whole free speech thing is a quandry when used to endanger people (Springfield and Fema are good examples). “There oughta be a law,” right? And Fox “News?” Ugh. News and Lies shouldn’t by synonymous. Anyway, I voted yesterday and am counting on my vote counting. 🙂 Go Kamala!
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Howdy D!
Here’s the thing, we limit free speech and all other rights when the state has a compelling reason to. Usually, the test is whether it impedes another’s rights. Political speech has been heavily protected by the courts, even if it does consist of transparent ridiculous lies. However, the argument can be made that Trump is impeding all of our rights by repeating known lies like Fox News was held accountable by Dominion and Smartmatic in their law suits, Alex Jones was held accountable for his Sandy Hook lies, and Trump is being held accountable for the Big Lie with his 32 felonies.
Of course, with the Roberts Court, such a case probably won’t get much of hearing, but the argument is out there to be made.
Huzzah!
Jack
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🙂 Yup.
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This got me thinking of another book with very similar implications and warning. I read it back in the late ’80s, and I think I may have let it wander off from my collection. Among other things, it included a detailed description of the creations of a cult member.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/757892.Snapping
We’ve have many studies over decades, maybe even centuries, of how such damage gets done, but, alas, few of how it can be undone at the macro level. Even in Germany, much as they thought they had buried the Nazi vampire with a stake through it’s heart, it rises again.
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Howdy Bob!
Undoing the damage of mass psychosis is “easy” but also difficult. Eliminate the constant stress and fear created by scapegoating the Other, and people’s brains go back to normal, mostly. Some don’t. After World War II, there were many Germans who still thought Hitler was a great leader and was right. The strength and destructiveness of belief and cognitive dissonance is greater than any thermonuclear bomb.
Then, I think that there is a percentage of the population that doesn’t tolerate differences between groups of people very well. They don’t see people of other races as being human. The greater the difference in racial phenotypes, the less humanity they see in them. Because Asians are fair skinned, especially those from northern Asia, they are seen as acceptable, barely. The darker and browner the skin, the more narrow the eyes, the less humanity they are imbued with.
Then there is the percentage that want to be led by a strong dictator. They will always walk amongst us. I would not be surprised if the two didn’t correlate.
We also have a large percentage that are persuadable to these two sets of beliefs. They aren’t as vulnerable or don’t originate them innately, but when presented with them, will go along.
The last bit is the geographical nature of culture. I wouldn’t be surprised that Nazism and fascism were not evenly distributed across the country. I bet there were places that were more enthusiastically fascist than others. I bet, like the Black belt in the South, that’s where fascism resides now and is spreading from. And, like the diaspora of Confederates, they took it with them after WWII and infected their new communities with it.
I think that is what the reawakening of fascism in Germany tells us.
I’ll have to look up Snapping. Thanks for the recommendation.
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Jack
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I’ve been thinking of the connection between child rearing practices, personality, and political orientation so well studied by Alice Miller {The Drama Of The Gifted Child; Thou Shalt Not Be Aware; For Your Own Good}, particularly, the inevitably abusive patterns in authoritarian parenting.
Another pattern that writers on democracy v. dictatorship have warned about since ancient Athens is excessive differences is wealth leading to the rise of demagogues who explain to people who is to blame for their hard work not paying off. That includes the observation that beyond some tipping point the “trickling up” becomes self reinforcing. We do appear to have reached that point.
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Howdy Bob!
It is funny how our social disorders mirror our individual ones. Groupthink is just a form of gaslighting, for example. We are all vulnerable to the same techniques and respond similarly when in the same situations. We really are all just human. That should be the basis for some empathy and understanding, but, honestly, I can’t get any emotional empathy going, just cognitive empathy.
I’m still impressed by Turchin’s cliodynamics, his wealth pump, and overproduced elites. I think there is a clear case to be made that the wealth gap and the problems it causes is due to bored elites looking for something worthy of their status to do. The Tucker Carlsons and Matt Gaetzes of the world if you will.
However, you describe the cause, we do seem to have reached a tipping point. Unfortunately, if we go over this one, it probably leads to a mass extinction event.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The challenge is, and has always been, to create and maintain social systems and institutions for how humans really are, instead of how, under whatever philosophy or religion, we happen to think they ought to be. We keep coming back to the puzzle of trying to live in and run mass technological “civilizations” with stone age hunter-gatherer brains.
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Howdy Bob!
I think you’re right. But, even our philosophies and our religions no longer serve a purpose for us. We don’t need them any more. We can explain the world around us, we don’t need religion. We don’t need a philosophy to provide us an ethics for how we treat each other. We don’t need a belief system to tell us who to love or reproduce with.
Our hunter-gatherer hardware just hasn’t evolved for the environment we’ve created for ourselves. We’re miserable because of it, but can’t figure a way out of it. How do you run a world of eight billion with everyone living in units of one hundred?
We’re stuck. And, we’re fucked.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Well, if the species makes it through an almost worst case climate change, it will pretty much have to be as hunter gatherers, able to move around to where food happens to be, not tied down to particular plots of land. That way of life got our ancestors through some large shifts over the last few millions of years. Then the question becomes whether there will be anything to hunt and gather, and where.
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Howdy Bob!
We might could make it as insect ranchers, but roping and branding the little suckers is going to be a chore. And, all the science fiction books have us eating from yeast vats and farming fungus to spin into all the nutrients we need, so there’s that.
Unfortunately, setting up insect, yeast, and fungus processing at any kind of scale will take some preparation time, which we probably won’t have. I think the climate end for many of us will come swiftly and with a terrible finality.
Huzzah!
Jack
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There is no doubt that the human population is going to be drastically reduced. I’ve never seen any estimate of the minimum number needed to maintain some version of organization and technological capability beyond the pre-industrial level. And, yes, planning would help a lot.
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Whatchoo mean “We”, Kemosabe?
He’s convinced a lot of people that his kayfabe is real, but there’s an equal number of people he has failed to do that to.
(and because the polling is being deliberately screwed with by flooding the polls with republican BS to make it seem so close as to set the stage for his “The Election Was Stollen II: Dumbass Boogaloo” nonsense I think it’s not nearly as close as everyone thinks it is. )
There are tons of bothsides jornanimalism going on to prop up the increasingly smelly corpse of ‘a normal political campaign’ as he rants on about Arnold Palmer’s dick size, and immigrants ‘Eating the cats!’ that they keep sane washing as ‘colorful language’, as if we’re not able to hear what he’s saying out loud in public.
But not all of us believe his bullshit.
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Howdy Bruce!
I mean we as in the collective. Elections are the greatest exercise in collective intelligence in human existence. We as a group come together to make a choice. If the Old FART wins, then he has successfully subverted our belief in democracy and our liberal ideals and replaced them with his narcissism.
There are those of us uniquely endowed to resist being indoctrinated, but there are many more who are willing converts and those who will just go along because meh.
While not all of us believe the bullshit, the question is can we stop the bullshit from drowning us?
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Jack
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The die is cast, the stone is rolling.. there is no stopping it now.
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Howdy John!
With two weeks and counting to election day, the polls won’t be able to show the shifts in the electorate that will result from Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior and any late breaking black swan event. I’ve maintained all season that the polls were going to be less accurate this time around than any previous election. What we perceive from the polling is not necessarily how things will shake out.
What isn’t cast, though, is Trump’s attempt to steal the election. Trump’s team has a well plotted step-by-step plan of how to steal the election, but it depends on state and county level officials and courts, ultimately the Supreme Court. There is no way to predict exactly how these people will react when push comes to shove.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I am thinking that he has enough loyal state and local officials in place who will expedite the take over plans and I am sure the supreme court would give it to him. Then there is the possibility that enough electors would refuse to certify the vote counts and cause the entire decision about who is to be president to be placed in the hands of the House of Representatives. If that happens, then he wins again.
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Howdy John!
My thinking is that he tries to Bush v Gore it. He spreads enough doubt about the outcome and ties it all up in court so that one or more states cannot certify the election, which is what happened in Bush v Gore. On Safe Harbor Day, in December, the states have to certify their vote totals. It was Safe Harbor Day that triggered the Supremes to step in 2000. He’ll try for the same thing.
If that fails, he’ll try to get the state legislatures to appoint alternate Republican elector slates, which John Eastman swears is legal, to compete with the ones the governor from the state has already certified. Part of the issue there is when are the new state legislatures seated and are they in session. In most of the battleground states, Democrats are governors. They aren’t likely to call the state legislature back into session.
Trump’s over all plan is to gum up the works enough to force the courts to intervene and the Supremes declare him the winner. Will John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Barrett go for it? Those are not clear votes in his favor no matter when the case reaches them or what it is about.
This is going to be a very messy election.
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Jack
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I am waiting for the day — which no one will escape — when he finally decides that all people who voted democrat are part of the enemy within and he gets hold of the very public voting records (anyone can get them) that actually show which part each voter is loyal to….fictional example for illustration would be as follows: PERCY ASSIVILE, (D) (For “Democrat.) These records are on line for anyone to see… so I fear that such a person, having lost all reasoning power, decides to round up all the democrats and either deport them to some remote island somewhere or to a series of convenient re-education camps situated out in the vast deserts …just like once happened in Germany.
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Howdy John!
I’m afraid that such a possibility is out there should Trump win. I don’t think he will be deporting us to any remote island, though. I think it is concentration camps and systematic death. It will develop slowly as it did in Nazi Germany, but that’s the road we’re on.
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Jack
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