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.
This is where Rush Limbaugh's famous rule comes from: "When you want to know what the Democrats are doing, just listen to what they are accusing Republicans of". I just got through watching a Free Press video about a full-on Climate Crisis influencer who for 10 years never questioned the 'existential' nature of the fast-approaching 'Climate Doom', even though she was constantly exposed to countervailing evidence. In her words "I couldn't have any doubts and retain my sanity, so I just decided to 'not doubt'. It took her until her mid-thirties to figure it out. These people willfully blind themselves, because to do otherwise is an 'existential' (to use the leftist's favorite word) threat to their personal well-being. And the organizers know this and are careful to make sure any doubters are immediately driven from the herd. This woman did incalculable damage to her own country, the country that had given her the ability to speak and write her own mind - and she used it to do evil.
On a lighter note, I am listening to Lionel Shriver’s latest, ‘A Better Life.’ The story is based on the actual proposal made by the New York mayor to create a program that would pay citizens to house asylum seekers, which never came into being. A “good hearted woman” makes an application that clears all the bureaucratic hurdles. Her daughters approve, and her son is appalled. The women so believe in the good they are doing, they can’t bear to hear what the son reports from his first hand observations in the city, and consider him a bigot just for bringing the facts to their attention!
It is a must listen, or must read, for the comical way Shriver depicts the Jungian paradox.
As a SPECTATOR reader, one of my favorite columns in that worthy publication is Lionel's. Always acerbically pungent, well conceived and thoughtfully ordered in its thesis, Shriver never fails to tickle my sense of irony and wry antiphrasis.
Although she did, by her own admission, vote for Biden in 2020. When I read the Spectator those in the comments section would always remind her of this horrible fact. I stopped reading that magazine when they got their new editor - that vile, failed Tory politician Gove- and so messed up the comment section that it was less worthwhile commenting.
Conceded! That's so often the fate of many otherwise excellent magazines (a new editor who's like a dyslexic bull in a special-collections & rare treasures section of a library, LoL). More validation to the 'exception that proves the rule' clause, eh! Ah well!
60 years ago, I took a junior college class on "Intro to Psychology". Most of psychology is baloney and mumbo-jumbo, but there was one absolutely true element of it; projection. People PROJECT their own fears and feelings onto other people. That's why it's easy to cheat an honest man; he's honest, so he expects the other man to be honest. And that's why there is no honor among thieves; THEY are thieves, so they expect everybody else to be thieves. Which was precisely what Rush was saying.
Democraps and communists have always been BIG on projection; they ALWAYS accuse other people of doing what they themselves have been doing.
I just said to someone today that it’s willful blindness driving the woke idiots (it’s mostly women and I say this as a woman) due to the brainwashing received at University. For a great many, a recovery simply won’t be possible because the brain is so deeply embedded with the woke narrative. It’s a strange and tragic situation in which we find ourselves.
"...mid-30s", eh? Well, that's about normal, given that the human brain isn't near-fully actualised until the third decade of life (according to behavioral psychologists). Despite the fact that physical 'maturity' becomes extant in the late teens, the sort of wisdom and greater comprehension that characterises mental maturity takes almost half again as long.
Of course, those suffering from what I call "arrested adolescence" wobble off the path to full mental acualisation long before the years add up to 30+. Using myself as evidence for the prosecution ('Exhibit A'), I was a Berzerkeleyite, back in 70s and fresh out of the Junior Birdman Corps, and was about as far left of center as a Nicaraguan Sandinista. It wasn't until I hit my 4th decade that I finally reversed polarity, politically speaking. A psychologist friend, at the Herrick Nut House, whom I shared that little milestone with, rolled his eyes, tweaked his 'stache, and said (more or less), "what else is new?" [I almost expected 'Julius', Groucho Marx's duck to drop down from the ceiling at that point, with $500 in his beak...]
The younger one is, the more desperately one searches for ideals that offer hope and promise...as helpful counterbalance to the endlessly depressing vicissitudes of real life. As one ages, the aggregate of broader acquired insight and wisdom progressively (hate that word) diminishes and dissipates ideals, aspirations and the yeaning hopes of youth, until there's little left to buoy one up on the daily, unending flood tide of bitter disappointments that is the human experience.
Dante summed it all up perfectly when he had his sign painter write over the entry portal to Hell: "Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate." All hail Marx (Groucho) and Lennon (John)!
Some of the most racist people I know believe themselves to be quite the opposite, at the High Vanguard of the Good. From what I have seen over the past several years, these same people also loved their lockdowns, they loved their masks, they loved their jabs. For several years now, at the barest whiff of a neutral mention of the Bad Orange Man, they go bananas.
What the individuals I know personally who manifest this species of nuttiness have in common is that their economic, cultural, and political status has become increasingly precarious over the past decade, more or less. Behind all this is a presumption they cling to, a life raft for the ego: we are better than those other people.
And who are "those other people"? Oh, BIPOCs, Mexicans, red necks, Born Agains, workers, small business owners, anyone and everyone who voted for Trump, and yeah, haul out the "Nazis," too, whatever that means anymore.
Why do galaxy brains feel the need to overanalyze everything? This is simple politics. Trump is the left’s boogeyman and everything they do is lensed through him. If Trump is for it, they are against it and their base eats it up, every, single, time. It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense and there is no “deeper” thinking done by most of the caterwauling leftists. I hate Trump is enough.
Making the opposing party’s president a boogeyman is an eternal feature of the idiotic binary in American politics, but the bizarre intensity of the reaction to Trump is unprecedented and worth analyzing on a deeper level.
Modern psychology is 90% bullshit, but Jung always struck me as less of a charlatan than his peers.
Fact: There has been a marked increase in the incidence of narcissistic traits over the past couple of decades (see Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”, 1979).
Among the people you know who have the most fanatical TDS, ask yourself if they are also more narcissistic. The answer is most likely, “Yes”. I think Trump’s blatant egotism really triggers these people who cannot admit to themselves that they are actually as narcissistic as he is. It’s the old story: load all your sins onto the scapegoat, then kill it!
Yes. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is, and has been on the rise. Mostly due to the fact that parents don't parent. They give their kids everything they want, if they can afford it, let them do anything they want, very rarely saying no about anything. The children run the households. The parents are merely there to do what the children want. Of course, they're narcs.
Of course, they demonized GWB, Mitt Romney and turned on the Maverick so fast he couldn’t believe it. With them, it was just politics. But Trump brought them to a whole depth. Rush was right in his diagnosis but he’d have to revisit it to explain these times.
Except this mindset existed before Trump and touches all areas of life. How can the Left condemn racism, but not only blatantly discriminate against Asian men in education but go well beyond that and engage in all-out racism by painting them as lesser people? Undeserving of a place in academia? And there are so many other examples.
OP's comment that "this posture is dangerous because it blinds a group to its own capacity for cruelty, censorship, conformity, and dehumanization" is important because this warped way of thinking will remain long after Trump has left the political scene.
Calling the Left’s insanity Jungian doesn’t mean anything, they’re simply nuts. Trump doesn’t pander to their idiocy like previous presidents and it pisses them off into a foaming at the mouth frenzy. He calls them out on their bullshit and they hate it.
Pretty much. People who can't think like grown ups dislike grown ups and form groups. As a functional illiterate who has never read Jung, I like to compare it to "Children of the Corn".
“ Liberalism, in its self-conception, wants to be post-father: post-patriarchal, post-tradition, post-command”
That is very true. Helicopter single moms and single dads that don’t punish their kids when they misbehave. A slap on the bottom to a child wearing a diaper causes no physical harm but it lets the child know there are repercussions in meat space.
You don’t have to tell your 4 year old kid to go to her room, that starts a game of testing limits. Just pick her up and carry her to her room and put her on her bed and leave, closing the door behind you. The message is received clearly and the crying fit stops in ten minutes. But the parents have to not compete for the childs affections or it will only encourage misbehavior.
Unfortunately divorced parents are usually competing with each other, often subconsciously - but the child sure picks up on it.
my friends with the worst TDS are all educated, self-absorbed, successful types.
it became clear to me a while back that I was witnessing a mass projection event. these people loath Trump because deep down, they are just like him. the only difference is that he flaunts his narcissism, while they hide theirs behind layers of talking points and shibboleths.
Trump knows how to suck their energy. They make themselves easy pickings. Me, I dislike and deeply disapprove of some things about Trump, I like and approve of other things, he's a mixed bag for me. But I will say, he's quite entertaining and I give him points for sheer nerve.
As the others have said , this is great analysis. It rings true and is articulated so laypeople can understand. You should have a Substack too. Or a podcast.
But then this self-image breaks into irreconcilable pieces and absurdities, where "women empowerment" is next to men in women sports and "girly dicks", "my body, my choice" is against medical choice, and it's "humanitarian" to castrate children. Sounds like a mental illness.
Would you mind telling the Aliens in Germany please? My poor son had to jump through many hoops to become a German citizen but they just pitch up and use all the German social security!
This story, sad and awful as it is, does not surprise me. But this is precisely the sort of injustice that can happen when you have a giant bureaucracy trying to deal with a giant, long out-of-control illegal immigration problem. I'm not excusing what happened according to this report (I can believe all of it), and the current administration is responsible for what transpires now. But it's not new. Ask Franz Kafka.
I tell non US citizens, never ever travel without up-to-date documents, or 6 months less to expiry, and keep the telephone number of your embassy and/ or consulate, and your lawyer, on your cell and also on paper with you.
So, just as a hypothetical, and given no one seems to have to prove anything to get free money and votes—how might a regular person get in on this? It’s February and a plane ticket and $2600 sounds pretty good right about now, though I guess Mexico’s right out. Asking for a friend.
Won’t work. I’ve been offering a total of 7200 dollars since 2019 to any of them who would leave for just 5 years, plus the same amount at the end of the five years if they choose to return, with the only conditions being they don’t vote in US elections and can only visit in the case of a family emergency.
Zero takers.
I’ve even offered the help of my Canadian relatives in moving my best friend of 35 years to Canada after endless hours of listening to Jim threaten to move to Canada.
He was offended, and did not take the offer.
And, to be clear, he is a millionaire, he and his wife both work from home, and he only lives an hour from the border.
He’d even be closer to where I live. I can see Canada from my house.
They are all full of sh!t. Not one of them would do us the solid of leaving, even if we paid them.
Now that we’ve been assured that no one’s illegal on stolen land and boundaries don’t exist, rendering folks stateless shouldn’t be the problem it once was. There’s some fantastic property on the Med fright now full of kind and delightful people who would welcome all of them with open pits. Sorry, arms. Sorry, windows?
Wellllll, that video was ALL kinds of interesting! The first thing that struck me was that — unlike those women like her are defending here in the US — she and her “partner” entered Canada legally (on a visitor’s visa). And even more interestingly, at some point, she says: “We can’t work, or access the [social, health]services of the country, which is understandable, because we’re not citizens of the country.”
So, lemme get this straight… it’s UNDERSTANDABLE that people who go to another country without legally immigrating there, would not be eligible for services there. Fascinating how the left believes that every other nation on earth has irrefutable sovereignty — except the USA.
Or Biden allowing millions to just walk in without vetting. They would not need increased facilities without his complete incompetence on border control. Until he realized it was unpopular and decided to make it worse by flying people in.
Emotional manipulation is the new strategy 100% of the time.
Just today, NYT published a story about Maryland and several other states filing lawsuits against new detention centers opening. Fine. Mostly journalism in action. But of course they had to insert a random photo of a crying detainee in El Paso who was originally picked up by ICE in Long Island New York.
What was he picked up for? No clue. It was simply a sad looking man sitting on a cot crying. The article did nothing to give the reader any context beyond a "Look! He's Crying!" moment.
Another reason legacy media's credibility is gone.
My local state legislators (north Seattle district) did a town hall two days ago. The first issue they brought up was ICE; not the state budget, crime, cost of living . . . . The covid lockdowns reminded politicians how easily people are manipulated and deceived.
They are doing the same thing in Maryland. Wes Moore took the millions in surplus that Hogan (R) left him and magically turned it into a $1.5 billion deficit. But our legislators can only talk about Trump and ICE.
I'm waiting for our Learing Centers to be revealed!!
Better start prowling around with a camera yourself. Sanity is thin on the ground in MD. We all need to be our own rescue plan (lots of loons in NC too, for sure).
I live in the PNW. My partner was at a wealthy, white customer's house giving him an estimate for work and the customer was lecturing him the whole time about how ICE is coming for us all, and we all need to be prepared to go into hiding at any moment. A week later, a lady at the grocery store blocked his vehicle from exiting a parking space while hysterically accusing him of being ICE because he has a missing license plate.
As I was reading 'cold summer 1816', and all of the responses--it occurred to me that this is what I always thought how 'the university' was supposed to feel. It is in the exchange of ideas...as iron sharpens iron...that we learn and stretch our capacity.
Chris you have attracted a truly fascinating group of people. What a joy.
A few days late, but I've decided to give up current events/news for Lent. This means no news aggregation sites--very limited X--no current event podcasts--but I do come to SubStack. I am able to handle the politics/current events here, I don't get so animated like I can on X or reading Citizen Free Press. I went for about 120 days last year, but went back after Charlie was murdered.
This article and the comments are exactly what I'm looking for, thank you Chris, and all subscribers/readers.
I watched President Trump with the Angel Families today and found myself thinking Who could hate this man that clearly has great empathy and love of country. Alls' I could come up with is Haters gonna Hate.
Snyder is a vile cretin, but he knows better. He's playing a game to get clicks and monetize his account. His hysteria is boomertard bait. The soy uncles, the wine aunts, they LIVE for their outrage. They click, they share, they comment: "that fascist pedophile Drumpf!"
They don't have Covid mask and jab hysteria anymore to condemn everyone, and they miss it dearly (Covid was the best time of their entire lives, seriously, it was). So now they have TDS.
Snyder is like the 105 IQ person taking the 95 IQ boomer idiots out for a drive, over and over and over. We have millions of 65+ year olds totally addicted to their dopamine fix. Snyder is cynically and quite disgustingly shoveling garbage into the collective boomer-maw to cash out. Just like Heather whats-her-name, the equally vile cretin on Substack who has a gazillion subscribers rage-reading in retirement communities across America.
Boomers are stupid chumps. Stupid chumps with money. Cha-ching! The worst generation in human history, and it's not even close.
I had a link to an AP article that I clicked. The comment section was a cesspool. And the most crazy thing about it was that it was all demonstrably false. All the norms and laws they were screeching that the great big orange man had broken were already broken by Obama and obliterated by Biden. It was wild. To your point, you can say: Trump doing this is bad. But it was also bad during Biden. It’s just wild to me listening to these people. The world didn’t exist before Trump. I hate it all!
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.
"Jung claims that whatever a group cannot admit in itself it will experience 'out there' in demonized form..."
Fascinating. What an interesting set of ideas to consider.
This is where Rush Limbaugh's famous rule comes from: "When you want to know what the Democrats are doing, just listen to what they are accusing Republicans of". I just got through watching a Free Press video about a full-on Climate Crisis influencer who for 10 years never questioned the 'existential' nature of the fast-approaching 'Climate Doom', even though she was constantly exposed to countervailing evidence. In her words "I couldn't have any doubts and retain my sanity, so I just decided to 'not doubt'. It took her until her mid-thirties to figure it out. These people willfully blind themselves, because to do otherwise is an 'existential' (to use the leftist's favorite word) threat to their personal well-being. And the organizers know this and are careful to make sure any doubters are immediately driven from the herd. This woman did incalculable damage to her own country, the country that had given her the ability to speak and write her own mind - and she used it to do evil.
On a lighter note, I am listening to Lionel Shriver’s latest, ‘A Better Life.’ The story is based on the actual proposal made by the New York mayor to create a program that would pay citizens to house asylum seekers, which never came into being. A “good hearted woman” makes an application that clears all the bureaucratic hurdles. Her daughters approve, and her son is appalled. The women so believe in the good they are doing, they can’t bear to hear what the son reports from his first hand observations in the city, and consider him a bigot just for bringing the facts to their attention!
It is a must listen, or must read, for the comical way Shriver depicts the Jungian paradox.
Watch her on Winston Marshall podcast on YouTube.
As a SPECTATOR reader, one of my favorite columns in that worthy publication is Lionel's. Always acerbically pungent, well conceived and thoughtfully ordered in its thesis, Shriver never fails to tickle my sense of irony and wry antiphrasis.
Although she did, by her own admission, vote for Biden in 2020. When I read the Spectator those in the comments section would always remind her of this horrible fact. I stopped reading that magazine when they got their new editor - that vile, failed Tory politician Gove- and so messed up the comment section that it was less worthwhile commenting.
Conceded! That's so often the fate of many otherwise excellent magazines (a new editor who's like a dyslexic bull in a special-collections & rare treasures section of a library, LoL). More validation to the 'exception that proves the rule' clause, eh! Ah well!
60 years ago, I took a junior college class on "Intro to Psychology". Most of psychology is baloney and mumbo-jumbo, but there was one absolutely true element of it; projection. People PROJECT their own fears and feelings onto other people. That's why it's easy to cheat an honest man; he's honest, so he expects the other man to be honest. And that's why there is no honor among thieves; THEY are thieves, so they expect everybody else to be thieves. Which was precisely what Rush was saying.
Democraps and communists have always been BIG on projection; they ALWAYS accuse other people of doing what they themselves have been doing.
I just said to someone today that it’s willful blindness driving the woke idiots (it’s mostly women and I say this as a woman) due to the brainwashing received at University. For a great many, a recovery simply won’t be possible because the brain is so deeply embedded with the woke narrative. It’s a strange and tragic situation in which we find ourselves.
"...mid-30s", eh? Well, that's about normal, given that the human brain isn't near-fully actualised until the third decade of life (according to behavioral psychologists). Despite the fact that physical 'maturity' becomes extant in the late teens, the sort of wisdom and greater comprehension that characterises mental maturity takes almost half again as long.
Of course, those suffering from what I call "arrested adolescence" wobble off the path to full mental acualisation long before the years add up to 30+. Using myself as evidence for the prosecution ('Exhibit A'), I was a Berzerkeleyite, back in 70s and fresh out of the Junior Birdman Corps, and was about as far left of center as a Nicaraguan Sandinista. It wasn't until I hit my 4th decade that I finally reversed polarity, politically speaking. A psychologist friend, at the Herrick Nut House, whom I shared that little milestone with, rolled his eyes, tweaked his 'stache, and said (more or less), "what else is new?" [I almost expected 'Julius', Groucho Marx's duck to drop down from the ceiling at that point, with $500 in his beak...]
The younger one is, the more desperately one searches for ideals that offer hope and promise...as helpful counterbalance to the endlessly depressing vicissitudes of real life. As one ages, the aggregate of broader acquired insight and wisdom progressively (hate that word) diminishes and dissipates ideals, aspirations and the yeaning hopes of youth, until there's little left to buoy one up on the daily, unending flood tide of bitter disappointments that is the human experience.
Dante summed it all up perfectly when he had his sign painter write over the entry portal to Hell: "Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate." All hail Marx (Groucho) and Lennon (John)!
That’s on the cover of a very famous Firesign Theatre record.
Simply put, a bunch of jerks blindly manifesting their neuroses. They are like our bipolar relatives, impossible to ignore
Some of the most racist people I know believe themselves to be quite the opposite, at the High Vanguard of the Good. From what I have seen over the past several years, these same people also loved their lockdowns, they loved their masks, they loved their jabs. For several years now, at the barest whiff of a neutral mention of the Bad Orange Man, they go bananas.
What the individuals I know personally who manifest this species of nuttiness have in common is that their economic, cultural, and political status has become increasingly precarious over the past decade, more or less. Behind all this is a presumption they cling to, a life raft for the ego: we are better than those other people.
And who are "those other people"? Oh, BIPOCs, Mexicans, red necks, Born Agains, workers, small business owners, anyone and everyone who voted for Trump, and yeah, haul out the "Nazis," too, whatever that means anymore.
Why do galaxy brains feel the need to overanalyze everything? This is simple politics. Trump is the left’s boogeyman and everything they do is lensed through him. If Trump is for it, they are against it and their base eats it up, every, single, time. It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense and there is no “deeper” thinking done by most of the caterwauling leftists. I hate Trump is enough.
Making the opposing party’s president a boogeyman is an eternal feature of the idiotic binary in American politics, but the bizarre intensity of the reaction to Trump is unprecedented and worth analyzing on a deeper level.
Modern psychology is 90% bullshit, but Jung always struck me as less of a charlatan than his peers.
Fact: There has been a marked increase in the incidence of narcissistic traits over the past couple of decades (see Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”, 1979).
Among the people you know who have the most fanatical TDS, ask yourself if they are also more narcissistic. The answer is most likely, “Yes”. I think Trump’s blatant egotism really triggers these people who cannot admit to themselves that they are actually as narcissistic as he is. It’s the old story: load all your sins onto the scapegoat, then kill it!
I always felt so sorry for those poor goats.
Yes. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is, and has been on the rise. Mostly due to the fact that parents don't parent. They give their kids everything they want, if they can afford it, let them do anything they want, very rarely saying no about anything. The children run the households. The parents are merely there to do what the children want. Of course, they're narcs.
Of course, they demonized GWB, Mitt Romney and turned on the Maverick so fast he couldn’t believe it. With them, it was just politics. But Trump brought them to a whole depth. Rush was right in his diagnosis but he’d have to revisit it to explain these times.
Except this mindset existed before Trump and touches all areas of life. How can the Left condemn racism, but not only blatantly discriminate against Asian men in education but go well beyond that and engage in all-out racism by painting them as lesser people? Undeserving of a place in academia? And there are so many other examples.
OP's comment that "this posture is dangerous because it blinds a group to its own capacity for cruelty, censorship, conformity, and dehumanization" is important because this warped way of thinking will remain long after Trump has left the political scene.
Calling the Left’s insanity Jungian doesn’t mean anything, they’re simply nuts. Trump doesn’t pander to their idiocy like previous presidents and it pisses them off into a foaming at the mouth frenzy. He calls them out on their bullshit and they hate it.
Well done. It does a good job explaining what appears to be a mass psychosis and mass escape from the asylum.
Thanks for this!
I think I should have paid more attention in those psychology classes! Great insight!!
Fascinating comment—thank you for sharing this thought
Pretty much. People who can't think like grown ups dislike grown ups and form groups. As a functional illiterate who has never read Jung, I like to compare it to "Children of the Corn".
Please, don't compare yourself to Gavin Newsom! :)
“ Liberalism, in its self-conception, wants to be post-father: post-patriarchal, post-tradition, post-command”
That is very true. Helicopter single moms and single dads that don’t punish their kids when they misbehave. A slap on the bottom to a child wearing a diaper causes no physical harm but it lets the child know there are repercussions in meat space.
You don’t have to tell your 4 year old kid to go to her room, that starts a game of testing limits. Just pick her up and carry her to her room and put her on her bed and leave, closing the door behind you. The message is received clearly and the crying fit stops in ten minutes. But the parents have to not compete for the childs affections or it will only encourage misbehavior.
Unfortunately divorced parents are usually competing with each other, often subconsciously - but the child sure picks up on it.
I’ve noticed the same phenomenon.
my friends with the worst TDS are all educated, self-absorbed, successful types.
it became clear to me a while back that I was witnessing a mass projection event. these people loath Trump because deep down, they are just like him. the only difference is that he flaunts his narcissism, while they hide theirs behind layers of talking points and shibboleths.
but they are just like him.
his ultimate sin is not hiding it like they do.
Trump knows how to suck their energy. They make themselves easy pickings. Me, I dislike and deeply disapprove of some things about Trump, I like and approve of other things, he's a mixed bag for me. But I will say, he's quite entertaining and I give him points for sheer nerve.
Your comment sums up my feelings about Trump 💯
As the others have said , this is great analysis. It rings true and is articulated so laypeople can understand. You should have a Substack too. Or a podcast.
did you consider the fact that we now have several generations of 'no father' adults?
But then this self-image breaks into irreconcilable pieces and absurdities, where "women empowerment" is next to men in women sports and "girly dicks", "my body, my choice" is against medical choice, and it's "humanitarian" to castrate children. Sounds like a mental illness.
Excellent analysis.
Coldsummer,
Thank you. Absolutely brilliant. Well done! Stick around, I want to read more of your thoughts.
bsn
I second that
What about the Republicans? What are they projecting right now??
“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.
Right? Detention is for people who demand a hearing. Just go home.
Would you mind telling the Aliens in Germany please? My poor son had to jump through many hoops to become a German citizen but they just pitch up and use all the German social security!
Do you have any more info on this Karen Newton? Why was her husband traveling on an expired visa I wonder?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice
This story, sad and awful as it is, does not surprise me. But this is precisely the sort of injustice that can happen when you have a giant bureaucracy trying to deal with a giant, long out-of-control illegal immigration problem. I'm not excusing what happened according to this report (I can believe all of it), and the current administration is responsible for what transpires now. But it's not new. Ask Franz Kafka.
I tell non US citizens, never ever travel without up-to-date documents, or 6 months less to expiry, and keep the telephone number of your embassy and/ or consulate, and your lawyer, on your cell and also on paper with you.
Ever traveled abroad? This is the way it is. It's not evil, it's immigration law, and every country has immigration law.
If Joe Biden hadn't opened the floodgates for four years, we wouldn't be dealing with this right now.
Isn’t it kind of weird her husband was trying to get a green card to work in
America while she lives in England? I kind of think there must be another side to this story.
So, just as a hypothetical, and given no one seems to have to prove anything to get free money and votes—how might a regular person get in on this? It’s February and a plane ticket and $2600 sounds pretty good right about now, though I guess Mexico’s right out. Asking for a friend.
You are onto something. We should offer $2600 and a free airline tickets to Americans (cough***Democrats***cough) who renounce their citizenship!
Won’t work. I’ve been offering a total of 7200 dollars since 2019 to any of them who would leave for just 5 years, plus the same amount at the end of the five years if they choose to return, with the only conditions being they don’t vote in US elections and can only visit in the case of a family emergency.
Zero takers.
I’ve even offered the help of my Canadian relatives in moving my best friend of 35 years to Canada after endless hours of listening to Jim threaten to move to Canada.
He was offended, and did not take the offer.
And, to be clear, he is a millionaire, he and his wife both work from home, and he only lives an hour from the border.
He’d even be closer to where I live. I can see Canada from my house.
They are all full of sh!t. Not one of them would do us the solid of leaving, even if we paid them.
Oh, I know. i just like to tweak hypocrites like your friend who hate it here but won't move.
Send him the CBP App to self deport.
If he says he's offended because he's a citizen, just tell him you weren't sure.
Why only 7,200? LOL.
Now that we’ve been assured that no one’s illegal on stolen land and boundaries don’t exist, rendering folks stateless shouldn’t be the problem it once was. There’s some fantastic property on the Med fright now full of kind and delightful people who would welcome all of them with open pits. Sorry, arms. Sorry, windows?
No need. They’re *constantly* threatening to move to Canada at their own expense. Let them pay for expenses the damned one way plane ticket.
I wonder how that’s working out? https://x.com/BrandonStraka/status/2026006057131385120?s=20
Wellllll, that video was ALL kinds of interesting! The first thing that struck me was that — unlike those women like her are defending here in the US — she and her “partner” entered Canada legally (on a visitor’s visa). And even more interestingly, at some point, she says: “We can’t work, or access the [social, health]services of the country, which is understandable, because we’re not citizens of the country.”
So, lemme get this straight… it’s UNDERSTANDABLE that people who go to another country without legally immigrating there, would not be eligible for services there. Fascinating how the left believes that every other nation on earth has irrefutable sovereignty — except the USA.
In Germany the Aliens get free medical services while citizens pay towards medical aid and have high co-payments, so well done for Canada!
Or Biden allowing millions to just walk in without vetting. They would not need increased facilities without his complete incompetence on border control. Until he realized it was unpopular and decided to make it worse by flying people in.
Democrats need to be defeated at all levels, then their fields need to be salted.
They are the enemy of all good people. Act accordingly.
I think a bunch of them are not considering this the optimum time.
I wonder how many Americans will be disappearing into those places??
Trump also wants insane asylums back. This is a good way to disappear people to.
Emotional manipulation is the new strategy 100% of the time.
Just today, NYT published a story about Maryland and several other states filing lawsuits against new detention centers opening. Fine. Mostly journalism in action. But of course they had to insert a random photo of a crying detainee in El Paso who was originally picked up by ICE in Long Island New York.
What was he picked up for? No clue. It was simply a sad looking man sitting on a cot crying. The article did nothing to give the reader any context beyond a "Look! He's Crying!" moment.
Another reason legacy media's credibility is gone.
And they never show any grief at all the murders and rapes that have been committed by illegals.
My local state legislators (north Seattle district) did a town hall two days ago. The first issue they brought up was ICE; not the state budget, crime, cost of living . . . . The covid lockdowns reminded politicians how easily people are manipulated and deceived.
They are doing the same thing in Maryland. Wes Moore took the millions in surplus that Hogan (R) left him and magically turned it into a $1.5 billion deficit. But our legislators can only talk about Trump and ICE.
I'm waiting for our Learing Centers to be revealed!!
Better start prowling around with a camera yourself. Sanity is thin on the ground in MD. We all need to be our own rescue plan (lots of loons in NC too, for sure).
Also Maryland allows Zizian linked to murders free on
bail. That was the group that executed a border patrol agent in Vermont.
Hard to have an intelligent discussion when you’re a delusional retard.
😂.. you have a point Steenroid!
Slave ships and gulags. Yes, where are the photographs or videos of the slave ships and gulags? No? Can’t find any? Incredible.
This is why I shun social media. My brain would explode if I was exposed to a constant barrage of this level of insanity.
Also odd that we never see our fascist overlords crushing these brave and stunning dissenters...
All from the same team that wanted the dirty unvaccinated pure bloods in concentration camps (or worse!). 🤪🤪🤪
Deport all illegals. This is only controversial among traitors.
you can't fix stupid
It's suicidal & they will drag everyone else over the cliff with them. Their mental hydrophobia cannot willnot be cured.
If any "fix" is possible it will require iron hard hearts.
Simple and succinct. 👍🤣
I live in the PNW. My partner was at a wealthy, white customer's house giving him an estimate for work and the customer was lecturing him the whole time about how ICE is coming for us all, and we all need to be prepared to go into hiding at any moment. A week later, a lady at the grocery store blocked his vehicle from exiting a parking space while hysterically accusing him of being ICE because he has a missing license plate.
Anyways, shit's stupid. The end.
‘What they accuse you of is what they intend to do to you’, etc. Yikes, comrades. The glow of warm collectivism is bright enough to read by.
Does Will Bunch buy things on Amazon?
Does he realize that what he bought came from a “soul-crushing” Amazon warehouse?
Why is he insulting the people who boxed up his order?
What about their souls?
As I was reading 'cold summer 1816', and all of the responses--it occurred to me that this is what I always thought how 'the university' was supposed to feel. It is in the exchange of ideas...as iron sharpens iron...that we learn and stretch our capacity.
Chris you have attracted a truly fascinating group of people. What a joy.
A few days late, but I've decided to give up current events/news for Lent. This means no news aggregation sites--very limited X--no current event podcasts--but I do come to SubStack. I am able to handle the politics/current events here, I don't get so animated like I can on X or reading Citizen Free Press. I went for about 120 days last year, but went back after Charlie was murdered.
This article and the comments are exactly what I'm looking for, thank you Chris, and all subscribers/readers.
bsn
Brilliant Dr. Bray and factual, but the left doesn't care about facts. As an aside, I love your nickname for the left's fake god.
I watched President Trump with the Angel Families today and found myself thinking Who could hate this man that clearly has great empathy and love of country. Alls' I could come up with is Haters gonna Hate.
Bat shit crazy the lot of them
Snyder is a vile cretin, but he knows better. He's playing a game to get clicks and monetize his account. His hysteria is boomertard bait. The soy uncles, the wine aunts, they LIVE for their outrage. They click, they share, they comment: "that fascist pedophile Drumpf!"
They don't have Covid mask and jab hysteria anymore to condemn everyone, and they miss it dearly (Covid was the best time of their entire lives, seriously, it was). So now they have TDS.
Snyder is like the 105 IQ person taking the 95 IQ boomer idiots out for a drive, over and over and over. We have millions of 65+ year olds totally addicted to their dopamine fix. Snyder is cynically and quite disgustingly shoveling garbage into the collective boomer-maw to cash out. Just like Heather whats-her-name, the equally vile cretin on Substack who has a gazillion subscribers rage-reading in retirement communities across America.
Boomers are stupid chumps. Stupid chumps with money. Cha-ching! The worst generation in human history, and it's not even close.
Note: I'm a boomer.
I wonder if it isn’t something simpler, like a younger idiot girlfriend or boyfriend, whom he is trying to please.
Wut duyano mee too
I had a link to an AP article that I clicked. The comment section was a cesspool. And the most crazy thing about it was that it was all demonstrably false. All the norms and laws they were screeching that the great big orange man had broken were already broken by Obama and obliterated by Biden. It was wild. To your point, you can say: Trump doing this is bad. But it was also bad during Biden. It’s just wild to me listening to these people. The world didn’t exist before Trump. I hate it all!