You Are Not Crazy
Our Superspreader of National Derangement Syndrome
I looked back at my “feed” from before the election. I try to tailor my YouTube and social media intake to credible sources. I balance my news sites, and read widely. Yet looking back over my playlists and “recently read” news sources, I see that almost everything I read or watched before the election was wrong, or blind, or just stupid blather.
I’ll write more about who was right (Hello, Naomi Klein!). But here’s a tragically accurate take from the Guardian a few days before the election. A plain reminder of who Donald Trump is (his “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval”), and how Americans fell for him.
Narcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.
If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS)…
This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.
Donald Trump is a superspreader of a craziness that has split America in two
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/02/donald-trump-is-a-superspreader-for-a-craziness-that-has-split-america-in-two?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I'm actually more interested in having a discussion about what the dems did wrong (and wrong, they did). I don't disagree with the craziness of all of it, or the derangement as you put it, but there were many reasons why people did vote for Trump, and it wasn't all because they simply forgot, or they are dumb, or they were hypnotized, or manipulated. I think that's super condescending. If we are going to get anywhere, and move forward, we have to look within ourselves and the party, and talk about where we went wrong, where we steered off kilter, where we became unbalanced. And if the dems continue to insist that they are blameless, well...they will get nowhere. Fast.
No one mentions the flood of misinformation from the right wing media. We have the best economy in the post Covid world yet all right wing media talks about is how shitty it is and how it’s the left’s fault. Without mentioning any specific policies that might have caused the f-ing price of eggs to rise.