Mass Hypnosis Event
People have gone crazy. It’s not politics. It’s actual mass madness.
ICE isn’t new. The Border Patrol isn’t new. Deportation isn’t new. Detention pending deportation isn’t new. Immigration law isn’t new.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association also complained about detention policy during the High Holy Reign of Saint Barack the Lightbringer: “The Obama administration's massive expansion of family detention began in the summer of 2014 and will incarcerate thousands of asylum-seeking children and mothers who are fleeing extreme violence in the Northern Triangle region of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) this year. This practice is a due process and humanitarian disaster and must end.”
But Timothy Snyder didn’t write in the summer of 2014 that America was becoming a country with ethnic cleansing and concentration camps. He’s not hysterical about immigration detention; he’s hysterical about Donald Trump, slavishly and mindlessly, because he is a loudmouthed fool and an empty bucket.
Keep going back. The quite famous litigation about detention policy that started as Flores v. Meese before becoming Flores v. Reno — those two case names should be communicating quite a bit of information right off the bat — grew out of the federal government’s immigration detention practices in the 1980s. Go read the Supreme Court’s opinions in the appeal that became Reno v. Flores. “Respondents are a class of alien juveniles arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on suspicion of being deportable, and then detained pending deportation hearings…”
That’s one of many cases in American legal history that covered questions about immigration detention, by the way. Start with Wong Wing v. United States, 1896. Donald Trump is so mean that he was already putting people in detention camps in the 19th century, or something.
There’s nothing happening, literally nothing, with regard to deportation and pre-deportation detention that hasn’t been happening for decades, and actually for well over a century. We argue over this stuff, and we always have, and it’s just fine to have the argument. I have no complaint about people who criticize detention policy. But the giant shared hallucination of the growing psychotic-hysteric class in American public life — “We are deciding right now whether we want to be a country with ethnic cleansing and concentration camps” — is mental illness in social and institutional form. Timothy Snyder is a historian, of all the things, and he depicts pre-deportation detention as a shocking new transition to “concentration camps.” He’s a smart man who has very much stopped being a smart man.
We could just have normal policy debate, again, but first we would apparently need to medicate about a third of the population. This level of psychotic hysteria is unsustainable. Our cultural revolution needs to be brought to a close.
I've tried to understand this phenomenon through a Jungian psychological lens...
A Jungian reading starts with projection and the shadow. Liberal professional-class culture in the U.S. strongly moralizes its own self-image: tolerant, rational, humanitarian, anti-authoritarian, post-racist, post-sexist. That self-conception requires disowning a lot of darker material, such as rage, cruelty, resentment, libido, contempt, tribalism, will to dominate. Jung claims that whatever a group cannot admit in itself it will experience “out there” in demonized form (i.e. the Salem Witch Trials). Trump has become a perfect carrier for the liberal shadow because he performs, publicly and shamelessly, precisely the traits that polite liberal culture represses: narcissism, vulgarity, libido, aggression, contempt for norms, delight in transgression. He doesn't just have these traits; he flaunted them. That makes him an ideal screen for projection. The media portrayal of him as uniquely monstrous, unprecedentedly evil, or quasi-demonic (“literally Hitler,” “end of democracy incarnate”) fits Jung’s description of shadow projection: the enemy is inflated into an archetypal figure because he is carrying not only his own sins but the disowned psychic contents of the group.
There’s also a strong archetypal “dark father” dynamic at work. Trump as portrayed in liberal media is less a politician and more a symbolic father-monster: the abusive patriarch, the lawless tyrant, the corrupt king, the grotesque father of the nation who must be overthrown so that the “good children” can breathe. Jung would say this is what happens when a society has an unresolved relationship to authority. Liberalism, in its self-conception, wants to be post-father: post-patriarchal, post-tradition, post-command. But the father archetype doesn’t disappear when you disavow it; it returns in distorted form. Trump becomes the nightmare father, the one who embodies everything you fear authority to be. The intensity of the reaction - panic, hysteria, apocalyptic language - suggests not just political disagreement but an eruption of the archaic image of the tyrant-father from the collective unconscious.
When a group projects its shadow, it tends to experience itself as purely good. That produces a kind of moral intoxication: “We are the Resistance,” “history is watching,” “this is the battle of light vs. darkness.” That rhetoric is psychologically seductive because it grants meaning and heroism to one’s own side while externalizing evil. Jung warned that this posture is dangerous because it blinds a group to its own capacity for cruelty, censorship, conformity, and dehumanization. We see this when liberal media and institutions adopt illiberal tactics like deplatforming, moral shaming, and ritual denunciations, while narrating themselves as the sole defenders of liberal values. In Jungian terms, the shadow hasn’t been integrated; it’s just been assigned to Trump and “his people.”
tl;dr this is the result of an atheist-materialist morality and the death of Christian anthropology on the left -- when you don't believe in original sin and that the potential for evil lives in all of us, you degenerate real fast into Manichaeism.
“What’s more shocking than ICE’s plan to cram as many as 8500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses?”
8500 illegals not taking the USA’s generous offer of $2600 and a free plane ticket home.