The Psychic War is Tedious and Pathetic

so don't

Let’s put some new developments and recent arguments together, focusing on what John Carter called “Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare.” My theme today:

Dr. Eithan Haim, the Texas surgeon who told the public that Texas Children’s Hospital was lying when it announced that it had ended pediatric gender procedures, drew some important conclusions after he testified before a congressional committee last month. I’ve been thinking about this ever since:

1. Against “the mot unremarkable, flagrantly dishonest, least impressive people…”

2. “The only people we can blame for all of their madness and the ensuing destruction is ourselves.”

3. “We haven’t confronted their madness with a bold commitment to truth.”

I linked recently to Mark McGrath’s description of the “Guardians of Decay.” Take a moment today to read McGrath’s new and highly readable essay on the tactics of those “activated automatons.” Note especially the “5T Protocol,” which I won’t describe here because it’s worth reading from the source:

The Guardian of Decay: How Broken Systems Use Nice People to Silence Truth

McGrath offers a checklist you can use to evaluate the behavior of a political actor or media figure to work out their intent. He says that bad actors, Guardians of Decay, do these things:

• Reframes inquiry as aggression or negativity

• Substitutes credentials for reasoning

• Uses guilt, fear, or fatigue to end discussion

• Deploys multiple logical fallacies

• Accuses reformers of being selfish, divisive, or dangerous

• Invokes healing or unity to shut down critique

• Claims neutrality while reinforcing institutional narratives

• Avoids argument; attacks character

• Relies on jargon or therapeutic language instead of logic

• Cannot explain why the system works—only why questioning it is wrong

If you consume “news,” you see these maneuvers every single day.

The news is about Donald Trump ambushing and arrogantly lecturing the president of South Africa with bizarre and invented claims about white farmers being murdered and facing a growing threat of extreme violence:

White farmers being killed? wHaT iS hE EveN tAlKInG aBOuT!?!?!?!?

Meanwhile, what Trump actually did in the presence of the South African president was that he played a long video compilation of the South African political leader Julius Malema explicitly and repeatedly calling for the murder of white farmers:

The news rushed to explain that “Kill the Boer” is a historic expression, not a literal expression, and “Kill the Boer” doesn’t mean kill the Boer.

But Malema is also on video talking quite clearly about the need for future killing — “Our revolution will require us to kill” — so this rhetorical maneuver is maybe not destined to be enormously successful.

Look again at McGrath’s list of behaviors that characterize “Guardians of Decay,” e.g., “Avoids argument; attacks character.” Then look at the real world event and the reaction to it: Trump shows video of a South African political leader calling for mass murder, and discusses the thousands of murders that have already occurred, then the news frames the moment as weird and aggressive and a hostile personal attack. It’s the most crushingly obvious behavior in the world, a Three Stooges sketch playacting as news.

A bunch of things in the world are not a huge mystery. You can see them pretty clearly. “Our revolution will require us to kill,” he says, and you can more or less guess what he means without a whole lot of deep analysis. Then the “mainstream” discourse tells you that X=Not X. The psychic war, the status quo gatekeeping, the guarding of decay, is just dogshit. It’s babble.

Examples are everywhere, this week.

RFK Jr. went INSANE! He LOST IT! He went CRAZY! McGrath: “Avoids argument; attacks character.” (“Accuses reformers of being selfish, divisive, or dangerous.”)

This is what actually happened, and I just absolutely love what Kennedy did here to Debbie Downer’s dumber sister:

You’ve been here for 32 years — what have you accomplished? There’s a reason the news frames that as losing it, and the reason sucks.

I endorse this view (screenshot — click this link to play video):

But the mask the permission structures have pulled over your eyes isn’t attached. You can just reach up and pull it off. To mix metaphors and go back to the opening image, the gates don’t actually work as barriers. Just, you know, don’t. Julius Malema isn’t using rich historical metaphor. Trump described reality, plainly. Patty Murray is a big dumb tub full of useless. This is all easy.

The mystery now is how we’ve let such deeply unimpressive people inculcate so much idiocy and emptiness over the last twenty years. It was always weak and lazy. We’ve been losing to…Patty Murray. “The only people we can blame for all of their madness and the ensuing destruction is ourselves.” It’s easy to stop. Just stop.