He has never had power of his own because he’s too much of an outlandish cartoon character. He just wormtongues his way from office to office. A lot of people think it’s an act, and to some degree it is, but it also isn’t. This is the weird, foggy area that guys like this exist in, where there doesn’t seem to be a boundary between feverish fantasy and reality. Everything is a comic book or stage-play to them.

I used to talk to incels and the like, I had success in the late aughts turning self-identified incels just by one-on-one time and chat and listening. It was exhausting and I felt like for every young dude I helped, 30 more incels would suddenly appear and start shitting on our online spaces and forums. It was like patching a dam that was bursting. More often than not they sounded JUST like Miller.

Over-the-top performance and grandiose statements, delivered stilted and awkwardly, unreal levels of boast and self-aggrandizing. If you listen to infamous incels like Elliot Rogers, you will notice they talk JUST like Stephen Miller.

All those dumb kids grew up, and were only reinforced by the grift-o-sphere, and they all moved on and got jobs and positions of power, but they never changed. Miller is one of them. He just learned where he can make the most impact, and it turns out wormtonguing the goddamn president himself was a very lucrative position.

My only consolation is that as soon as Trump keels over, any fukkin day, Miller will have ZERO power. It will be glorious.

There are about a hundred post-titles like this across everyone’s feed right now, and not a thing will change.

It should be your glimpse into our atomized worldview that makes us think that “our side is winning, our day of retribution is coming any day now.”

Meanwhile the right is also seeing their own versions of every story, often written by the SAME media groups, to make them think their side is winning, and their day of retribution is coming any day now.

The left broadly still tip-toes so gingerly around any group or ethnicity that they trip all over each other to make sure nobody feels excluded, and ends up making an environment that feels so much like walking on eggshells that nobody wants anything to do with it other than kids who want to earn performative inclusivity badges.

I got very burned out when I was more active in a few groups and half of every meeting was just qualifiers and disclaimers instead of organized action. And in the intervening years it’s gotten worse as we’ve lost more ground.

I get we need to have solidarity for people who don’t have a voice, but I’m not sure our species broadly knows how to turn that into an actionable strategy that doesn’t push away the very people we need on board, the tuned-out, short-attention-span masses who still equate leftist activism with some south park stereotype.

Friendly reminder from your neighbor who is clinging to the railing of the sinking ship…

You are also in a ship held afloat by the whims of capital. Make sure what’s happening to us doesn’t happen to you. Get involved with your community, make sure the wealthy are kept in check, keep your media free.

It’s a lost cause, this infection will spread as long as money exists, but you can slow it down long enough that a new generation of leadership may come into power who have more experience and knowledge how to protect us from the Kayfabe future of manufactured drama meant to drive prices.

Yep, this is rage-bait or some sexual kink thing surfacing as a news story because the authors know it will get shared to hell and back. While I have absolutely no doubt that there are plenty of right-wingers with weird sexual hangups that they’re trying to make everyone’s problem, cousin-marriages are pretty low on the list of things we need to worry about. As long as everyone is adult and consenting I literally do not care what people do with their peepees.

When I was about 12 or so, my father, who was just really bad at like, everything, and was always inebriated… was checking something on the 12-gauge he kept in the house, he decided to sit next to me on my bed to fiddle with the thing and of course, he pulls the trigger and it goes off.

Fortunately it was pointed away from me, and fortunately there was nobody else in the house at the time, so it just took a large chunk out of the wall and not a family member, but it was startling on a level that shook me for life, and whether he meant to teach the lesson or not, I sure as shit learned the rules of firearms from that incident.

It also makes me call BS on at least the “saving private ryan” part of the 4chan post. There’s no way you will mistake an actual firearm going off for any kind of media or recording.

Paintball guns can easily remove an eyeball, yet the way people handle them at open games should make us all terrified for how unaware and and careless people are around dangerous devices. We need far more training and preparation on a nationalized, standardized level for preparing people for the real world.

A lot of it is Kayfabe. Don’t get lulled by the performance and theater, they (the comedians, network execs and everyone else who appears on camera) are performers who have a role and they’re only there because they play that role well.

I’m not saying they’re all “in on it” but they get marching orders, they get back-room deals to do this and that, they’re instructed by the people who control whether or not we can see them. It’s normal.

If we were to understand just how much of our informational world (including network media) is completely scripted from the ground up to engage us in a narrative of Good Versus Evil, we would realize that we’re just in WWE theater meant to distract us from the wealthy who are consuming our world around us like locusts.

Literally if you’re nice to me I’ll be attracted to you eventually.

This isn’t a unique, debilitating flaw. This is most people. Five decades navigating human interaction has shown me over and over that most of us are so desperate for connection that we will rapidly bond with all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. Men and women alike, all day long.

The thing about those pickup art grifters and redpill bullshit sites, is that they’re framing this like some kind of jedi trick, but it’s fantastically easy to make people like you, your challenge though to be better than those scumbags is to not do it for false pretenses. Just literally make people feel good and you will have more options in your life for intimacy.

If more people understood that almost everyone actually does work like the vending machine we would understand how broken we each are and be able to stop treating ourselves like vending machines.

It’s not on you if someone tricks and victimizes you, but it is on you to recognize and practice some form of value system and self-respect so that you don’t build a story in your head to explain why you’re in love with your coworker who treats you nice.

What is almost more infuriating about this entire thing is that Russia wasn’t even primarily responsible for any of this. I’m sure they had a hand, but there are so many other forces trying to do this at once. For example, Elon Musk monetizing his blue-check engagement just enough for someone in India to make a living on has been a disaster for our public discourse. There are literally millions of people who are spreading propaganda and lies around the internet in attempts to make people angry, to get reshared, to get views, so nothing is off-limits to them, because they don’t have a stake in the future of the US and EU, they’re just working for food.

This is absolutely about critical thinking and I wish we could all be so lucky to have a teacher like you did.

But I realized in typing this out that I have stopped saying the term “critical thinking” years and years ago, because like other terms it has basically lost all meaning, like “gaslighting.” People just say it without any idea what it means, so I stopped saying it. Instead I try to explain it to people without naming it, because people on both sides of every issue think they know what it means.

We need some kind of new order with a nationalized Mr Rogers type system for teaching people the most basic shit all over again. Literally, I am astonished how people missed even the most basic lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, I feel like a huge segment of the population were watching G.I. Joe as kids and routing for Cobra or booing the public service messages at the end.

And as someone who struggled with depression, I also wanted to offer the counterpoint that when you are experiencing a depressive episode, you aren’t necessarily going to be receptive to people coming around your bedside and giving flowers and support. It’s a mental state that rejects happiness or even comfort, so while I get the idea behind the comic, it’s over-simplified and not really prescribing anything. We don’t treat physical and mental illness the same, nor should we.

We should understand that they’re both equally real conditions that people suffer from, and need help in treating, but we need to stop giving this ammunition to unwell brains that their depression is part of a narrative where people aren’t going to help you or support you.

People broadly are bad at supporting and helping with mental OR physical conditions, as you outlined. Every time I’ve ever been ill, physical or mental, I’ve had to spend all my time reassuring others and taking care of the emotional states of those worried. This is how it usually goes, when we get sick or injured, we are not going to get helped by others, and managing the way others feel on top of being unwell is just part of the course, we don’t get a relief or break. We won’t get satisfaction no matter what happens, we have to just hunker down and get through it without expectation in others.

It actually helps their cause that there is a new study now - according to their disinformation machine this is just another “opinion” and proves their point.

KGB manuals written decades ago in the Cold War outline this tactic for destabilizing nations and getting populations to stop holding their government accountable, it’s the relatively simple process of just amplifying every argument, every side of every social issue, every scandal and every news story from the most extreme framing and to make sure you’re turning even the most reasonable idea into two extreme sides screaming nonsense at each other.

And for average, poorly educated, incurious people, a scientific argument is as nonsensical as a rambling spiel about raw milk and essential oils. If you don’t know how cells and chemistry work on even the most basic level, you have no framework to question if it makes sense putting red meat at the top of a new food pyramid. You just see arguments that you don’t understand both for and against it.

Since most people now get curated, atomized perspectives of the world, they don’t have a baseline to refer to for truth, so this effect has been distilled and enhanced with the internet and algorithms. Many people just read stories with competing, extremist language all day and tune the fuck out. They don’t know who or what to trust anymore, because everyone is shrieking that everyone else is lying, so they default to just whatever their mainstream media reporters tell them and stop feeling involved or connected at all. This is how state-media takes over a nation and cements the rule of the manipulative ruling-class.

how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?

Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it’s just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.

This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It’s not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It’s default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn’t actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.

When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It’s vastly important we understand this about our brains.

You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don’t do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life… but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it’s not conscious reasoning at all, it’s story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it’s you reasoning, but it’s just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.

So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else’s supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.

“Jesus died for your sins” makes no logical sense, but it’s not meant to, it’s meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you’re going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That’s a paralyzing fear for almost every human who’s ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn’t worry about it so much.

Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question… What if you’re wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.

edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you’re kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.

I already said I agree with the assertions, I just don’t agree with the bleak, hopeless, roll-over-and-expose-belly-for-master resignation. We’ve struggled through worst in the past, and generally if you look at all metrics, our quality of life and freedom has only increased over the last several centuries and most unrest and destabilization are just the pendulum swinging, but that pendulum doesn’t wind down, history shows it gradually moves forward.

We still owe it to the people who will come after us to do all we can, we still can see change in our lifetimes towards better outcomes we can still help push the needle, we can see grand outcomes when we actually try, we can still involve ourselves to the extent of our ability and comfort, and/or we can have individually great experiences and set aside what media shoves in your face all day, learn to diet and just focus on the problems for a certain amount of time every day.

Go socialize, meet people, create love and safety around yourself with others and see sights in the world while you can.

Yes, shit is going to get bad, maybe worse than anything we’ve seen so far. But the mountain of skulls we live on to have gotten to this next struggle shouldn’t be wasted.

There should be a word, and I’m sure it exists in German or something, for when you agree with someone’s assertions but simultaneously know for a fact they’re just doomer-venting and sound like an edgy teen trying to describe to their mom why they wear black.

do we literally have to wait for the next administration to do anything with all the evidence being recorded right now?

Honestly, it may even be longer. But the tide will shift.

America has had some dark periods in the past that historians can speak to with more authority, but this might be the biggest one that every single citizen is witness to and involved with, so the stakes are a lot higher, whatever happens here can lead to widescale public instability. It’s not sustainable, so one way or another it will break.

But there are enough clowns desperately clinging to their circus right now that even after the big orange one kicks it, which could happen any moment, it’s going to a shit-show of power-struggling and back-stabbing and maligned plans. It could take a decade to see the US start to stabilize.

(This is best case of course, it’s also possible that this is it, and the US is going to be the Russia of the Americas, a rusting, closed-down, run-down hermit nation run by organized crime, embargoed and sanctioned and only able to sell its own dwindling natural resources, and old weapons stockpile to rogue nations and rebel groups who can afford antique F23’s and ancient M1 tanks.)

No you’re right, it’s a horrible term that was spawned by the very people who wanted to sabotage our better world. The people who introduced the idea that there were “sides” in a “gender war” are particularly likely to be written about in our granddroid’s textbooks as the scourge of our world.

We are wired to be social, to bond with others and mate and raise families and babies and love our little communities. It’s not that hard it’s just that we’ve allowed it to become so toxic and complicated because we also have over-developed internal simulators that constantly run simulations of the worst outcomes, and it makes us nervous about how others view us. Bad people have leveraged this fact to make us all hate each other and ourselves.

I know deeply how infuriating this was to watch, and I’m pretty sure that as bad as it feels now… things will get worse before they get better, and then when they get better a lot of serious shit is going to happen to every masked asshole in that video.

Either the system will rebound and we will have justice, or the system will NOT rebound and we will go get our justice.

I’d hate to die alone bleeding out on my steering wheel because of a fat, stupid, mentally deficient ICE agent who hates women decided I would be a stand-in for his mother that day.