novapsyche

@novapsyche444

A room with a sociological view.

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novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jul 13

The supposed crisis in young men in America appears to be mirrored in at least one segment of the adult population, namely the male electorate bemoaning the fall of Graham Platner. There seems to be a deep yearning to uphold rather than scrutinize toxic masculinity, a disturbing revelation.

"I'm right there with Emma [Vigeland, co-host of The Majority Report]. I had never seen that symbol of [Graham Platner's] tattoo, and still find a plausible that he didn't know what it was. I was okay with the initial unsettling allegations from that controversy a few weeks before the latest. And finally, I think that there is a rational case to be made that an [anti-Israel] rapist is better than Susan Colllins."

— YouTube comment, found in the comment section attached to The Bitchuation Room (with Francesca Fiorentini, Episode "The Online Left Dog Piles on Emma Vigeland"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYRL7hnHa2s

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jul 6

What if it's the entire Democratic party that's insecure? novapsyche.substack.com/p/death-head...

"In the current American political landscape, those drawn to a hard, unempathetic view of masculinity (one might even call it cruel) gravitate toward the Republican party. Those folks then get concentrated there and reinforce each other’s views, in turn creating an epistemic bubble where they define reality for themselves.

"In such an environment, those in the GOP extolling toxic masculinity (the need to dominate, conquer, degrade) see the Democratic party as diametrically opposed to them. If they are the dominators, Democrats must be the ones to be dominated. If they’re the epitome of virile masculinity, then Democrats to them are conquerable females.

"We must recognize this relationship in order to counter it."

— "Death Heads and Dominance" (Substack post), October 26, 2025
https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/death-heads-and-dominance

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jun 16

Bongino doesn't realize that he's proving the point. Nazis and fascists (not to mention racists) are precisely the ones who would slander a Black female as male. That's the exact point. This is not a tit-for-tat or tu quoque ("You, too"). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"[S]ome on the right defended Hokit. Dan Bongino, a rightwing podcaster and former deputy director of the FBI under Trump, tweeted: 'The pearl clutching over a joke, made by a UFC heavyweight known for his post fight stand up comedy acts, is next level hypocrisy.

“'The same people moaning and clawing at their faces over it have absolutely no problem calling President Trump and his supporters "nazis," and "fascists," so I’ll pass on the faux outrage.'"

novapsyche@novapsyche444· May 4

It goes without saying that the Trump administration is riddled with groupthink. agcommtheory.pbworks.com/f/GroupThink...

"The main principle of groupthink, which I offer in the spirit of Parkinson's Law, is this: *The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups.*"

— Irving Janis, "Groupthink" (1971) (excerpt)

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Apr 18

Yes, they did. Perhaps you are not aware. But your lack of awareness does not mean that it did not happen.

"A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as 'no response.' The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.

"'We also didn’t create a new category for Gaza responses out of fear that category would be leaked. Instead we were told to mark them as "no response,"' the organizer said, faulting top Harris campaign leaders for failing to address the issue. 'The only "clowns" out there are those who were in senior leadership and decided to abdicate on this issue, who silenced a Palestinian speaker at the DNC, and who told us to ignore it every time a voter asked us about Gaza.'"

-- excerpt from NBCNews.com, "'Uncommitted' leaders stand by 2024 strategy after Trump floats Gaza takeover," February 5, 2025
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/uncommitted-leaders-stand-2024-strategy-trump-floats-gaza-takeover-rcna190782

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Apr 8

As I wrote in early 2024: novapsyche.substack.com/p/team-biden...

"This puts the lie to the idea that this is an election where democracy is at stake. This cannot be true. Biden wouldn’t be rolling the dice in a bid for re-election, where he can 'aw, shucks' a loss if one comes his way. He’d be pulling out all of the stops to rescue the country. There’s no way that, in such a state of emergency, that he would leave any votes on the table.

"Yet that’s exactly what he and his team are doing. They’re saying, 'We can write off those votes—we don’t need them.' Yet, if they lose, they will blame those same voters that they dismissed as the reason for that loss.

"Not only is this cynical, it’s insane. You don’t double down on a shaky strategy of 'Oh, it’s a binary choice, they’ll "come home" in November' if you’re worried about a fascist takeover. No, you make a sacrifice.

"Here, the choices are clear: either make room for another candidate so that the Democratic contest can start afresh, or change policy as it pertains to Israel.

"Those are the choices. Biden cannot both stay on the ballot and maintain his policy if he expects to win."

-- "Team Biden rolls the dice," Substack essay, March 3, 2024

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Mar 20

The "necessary ingredients for a double bind": ▪️ Two or more persons, one of whom is the 'victim' ▪️ Repeated experience ▪️ A primary negative injunction ▪️ A secondary injunction conflicting with the first, and enforced by punishment ▪️ A tertiary injunction prohibiting victim from leaving the field

Excerpt from Bateson et al., "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1956), pp. 206-207.

A transcript can be found here: https://www.solutions-centre.org/pdf/TOWARD-A-THEORY-OF-SCHIZOPHRENIA-2.pdf

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Mar 19

Interestingly, in the examples that Bouie listed, he did not mention the medical event in the White House where someone fainted and everyone rushed over to help the person — all except Trump, who literally stood by as though waiting for someone to move furniture or take out the trash.

Donald Trump stands as a man who collapsed is brought to the ground. Credit: NDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Mar 15

I don’t remember Kulinski telling his audience not to vote for Harris. But, even if that were so, third-party votes did not provide the margin of loss. This is a strawman built to shame voters, rather than put the blame where it belongs — on the candidate for a poor strategy.

Win margins for swing states in the 2024 election. There is nearly a 600K vote shortfall n terms of third-party votes compared to Trump's results in those states.

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Mar 13

"U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, right, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrive for a meeting in the vice president's ceremonial office at the Eisenhower Office Building in Washington, D.C., on July 25, 2024. (Roberto Schmidt / AFP)"

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Mar 3

Screenshot of a scene from In Living Color. The sketch, "The Dirty Dozens," spoofed the Wheel of Fortune game show. The wheel features beginnings of "yo mama" insults, which the contestants must finish. Here, one contestant spins the wheel goodnaturedly but is about to land on the space of "Yo mama's so good at math."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E3-2FLjuVM&t=977

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Feb 15

I anticipated this argument coming from Chatterton Williams specifically. Something in me just knew.

"As a person of color (particularly as an African-American), in order to accept white supremacy in America, one must accept that capitalism is supreme. That is to say, slavery was all right in the end because now Black people have a higher standard of living than they would otherwise. The convert is convinced that he’s lucky (or even blessed!) to be here.

"This shift requires compartmentalization. One must shelve the fact that Black bodies *were* capital — Black bodies were fungible, which is how they came to be on these shores here and now — and it requires amnesia of commodity, of the arbitrariness of the color line, for the imagined luxury of being able to participate in the system of capital, as though that weren’t a living contradiction."

-- Excerpt from "Inside race-ball" (Substack essay), December 11, 2025

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Feb 12

Several months ago, I touched on what constitutes narrative warfare.

"The tenets of narrative warfare, as well as psychology more generally, tell us that people latch onto information if it already aligns with other beliefs and data points they’re invested in.

"That would go toward explaining that constant sense of disorientation among many of us, especially on the left — it’s cognitive dissonance arising from constant, unceasing gaslighting. Because it’s a psychic attack — an attack on one’s sense of reality — it’s difficult to identify, let alone counter."

— excerpt from "Student protests, dirty tricks, and forms of verbal warfare" (Substack essay), June 21, 2024
https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/student-protests-dirty-tricks-and

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 22

I agree with your last statement. But also know that the antebellum South has been recognized by scholars as being proto-fascist. brill.com/view/journal...

"This article examines how the Southern proslavery defense produced a distinctly proto-fascist ideology. Rather than comparing the Antebellum South to twentieth century racist regimes, this study compares Southern fascist thought to Germany’s nineteenth century _Völkisch_ movement. The author uses Roger Griffin’s Palingenetic Ultranationalism to explore how the Antebellum South promoted an illiberal vision of modernity. The author argues that proto-fascists rejected liberalism, had a profound sense of social decay, and advanced a vision of a new man, new political structure, and a new temporality. The striking similarities between nineteenth and twentieth century fascist movements mandates that the Antebellum American South should be included in comparative fascist studies. The results of this study contextualize the comparisons made between American racism and fascism along with deepening our understanding of fascism’s protean qualities."

— Stefan Roel Reyes, "Antebellum Palingenetic Ultranationalism: The Case for including the United States in Comparative Fascist Studies," Fascism (2019), Vol. 8, No. 2 (Abstract)

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 22

The further down the road we get, the more that this death ethos (as described in this passage by Sir Richard J. Evans) will begin to resemble that of its forerunner.

“‘Death holds no sting for us,’ Heinrich Himmler told the SS, ‘because individuals die, but the folk, the people, the race lives on.’ SS men commonly sang an anthem, including a passage dedicating themselves to love death….

“And so powerful was the influence of this cult of death that the most committed Nazi soldiers internalized it, turning the Waffen SS, the military divisions of the SS, into a military force whose casualty rate was far above that of ordinary front-line soldiers, often to the scorn of professional army generals who thought that the Waffen SS men sacrificed themselves needlessly when it had no tactical advantage….

“So death was presented not in terms of suffering but, in the sanitized language of Nazi war art and literature, a glorious passing that would lead to celebration rather than mourning.”

— Professor Sir Richard J. Evans, “The 2017 Michael King Memorial Lecture: War in the Nazi Imagination” (Division of Humanities, University of Otago, October 18, 2017 [YouTube], ~ 23:59)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAHUyHDTphQ&t=1499

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 22

But what I'd suggest to @jamellebouie.net is this insight from Robert Jay Lifton's seminal work Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (p. 423):

"The individual [manipulated by ideological totalists] responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the _psychology of the pawn._ Feeling himself unable to escape from forces more powerful than himself, he subordinates everything to adapting himself to them. He becomes sensitive to all kinds of cues, expert at anticipating environmental pressures, and skillful in riding them in such a way that his psychological energies merge with the tide rather than turn painfully against himself."

— Robert Jay Lifton, _Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism_ (1961), p. 423.

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 16

"These days, influencers utilize brigading but for propagandizing, which in impermeable bubbles makes the viewpoint appear unanimous. This triggers a cognitive bias that tends to make the listener accede to the viewpoint. It takes just 3 harmonious voices without dissent to cause this effect."

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 14

No disrespect to Frost here, but the phrase below is now a thought-terminating cliché: it doesn't help understanding and in fact stops conversation.

"Trump is a symptom, not a cause"

-- Bluesky post by Frost, January 14, 2026

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 10

Kristi Noem's labeling of Renee Good as a terrorist & Vance's praise of the murderer echo Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir's rhetoric w/r/t the IDF's actions against Palestinian civilians. These semantic twists have real effects on listeners.

"Far more concerning is Ben-Gvir’s praise of clearly murderous acts. His high station in the government and his elevation of these deeds mean that, in effect, he is blessing murder. When disguised IDF soldiers infiltrated a West Bank hospital in Jenin and assassinated a patient there in his hospital bed as he slept, Ben-Gvir exalted those assassins as heroes to be commended. And this week, when IDF soldiers guarding a high perimeter in Jerusalem shot and killed a 12- or 13-year-old Palestinian boy playing with a sparkler during the Ramadan holiday, Ben-Gvir labeled the boy a ‘terrorist’ and said the soldier was a ‘warrior.’ He said he would try to get the soldier an award. This would be for sniping a pre-teen in the head."

— Substack essay, “The reproduction of genocidal culture” (novapsyche’s spot), March 17, 2024

https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/the-reproduction-of-genocidal-culture

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 9

You're not going to like where this is going. I say this as someone who for the last decade has studied such subject matter as social psychology, extremism, cults, psychopathy, mass media, genocide, authoritarianism, US history, &c. I can scarcely express how much trouble we're in.

"It may go without saying, but I’ll articulate it anyway: the risk of violence is heightened by the nature of MAGA itself. It is a cult of personality, taking direction from its pinnacle leader. In such a social structure, things — given conducive conditions (manipulation, suggestions, nudges, deflections of blame, stoking of resentments) — can morph in a microsecond.

"In my darkest Cassandra moments, I foresee a reverse Jonestown situation."

— “The Danger of Mono-Control,” Substack essay (novapsyche’s spot), March 23, 2025
https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/the-danger-of-mono-control

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 9

Kteily et al. (2016) distilled this idea: psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-...

"[P]erceiving that one’s ingroup is blatantly dehumanized by an outgroup can provoke individuals to reciprocate by dehumanizing that group in turn, thus increasing support for violent and aggressive collective actions against it."

— Kteily et al., “They See Us as Less Than Human: Metadehumanization Predicts Intergroup Conflict via Reciprocal Dehumanization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2016), Vol. 110, No. 3, p. 344

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 7

I know some say he went off the deep end later in his career, but if you have yet to read Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism, you owe it to yourself. He describes these psychosexual issues and their origins in detail.

"In several passages from The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich asserts this central thesis:

"'*Man’s authoritarian structure* — this must be clearly established — *is basically produced by the embedding of sexual inhibitions and fear in the living substance of sexual impulses.*' (p. 30)

"'When sexuality is prevented from attaining natural gratification, owing to the process of sexual repression, what happens is that it seeks various kinds of substitute gratifications. Thus, for instance, natural aggression is distorted into brutal sadism….' (p. 31)"

-- excerpt of Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), quoted in Daily Kos diary "Christian nationalists, in fascist rallies and propaganda, enact the ritual sacrifice of enemeies" (novapsyche, July 6, 2022)

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/6/2108799/-Christian-nationalists-in-fascist-rallies-and-propaganda-enact-the-ritual-sacrifice-of-enemies

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 6

Photoshoot of Adolf Hitler in nine distinct, theatrical poses, circa 1925.

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 2

Copycats exist irrespective of politics, yet the liberal side has no infrastructure that encourages this kind of vigilantism. OTOH, as I wrote a few years ago, the right has built an entire industry as part of their "talent scouting." www.dailykos.com/stories/2023...

"The GOP provides roles, bit parts that can be walked into, no understanding required. Wing it and rise—they have an entire media universe structured to take ready-made talent and thrust unpolished raw material in front of the camera or microphone to let the environment finish the bake, like a kiln. It’s all pre-set. All it takes is some gumption, some inner spring inside the ambitious upstart, the latest Jesse Watters or whomever else is willing to be as plastic as the situation requires, as long as a paycheck and admiration from the crowd is forthcoming.

"All it takes is that sense of jumping the line, jumping on stage, and breaking the fourth wall in society by acting out. Not acting up—though we have that sometimes as a blended role. No, acting out: performing a fantasy in the middle of real life."

-- Excerpt, "The GOP project is now all interactive storytelling, a Satanic panic 2.0" (Daily Kos, April 29, 2023)

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Jan 2

This is happening only on the right. 🧵 x.com/ThomasMHern/...

"Well that escalated quickly.

"I decided to drop by the Somali-run 'childcare' center Binati Childcare Two in Columbus at 5PM to see what type of activity was going on.

"After a couple minutes of asking questions and a few knocks on the door, I was threatened by a group of men."

-- Thomas Hern, Twitter / X post, December 30, 2025

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Dec 14

What you say about hypercapitalism reminds me of something I wrote last year. Kinda ties in:

"Make no mistake: the problem of pornography is a problem of capitalism. Why? Because, _under capitalism, human relationships are not just distorted but fundamentally changed, altered by the properties of the system itself._

"In capitalism, people are fundamentally abstracted and reduced in terms of the ever-extensive, overarching and downward-pressing economy, which restructures the way that people interact in social spaces.

"In the instance of pornography, the consumer — already an abstraction and distortion of one’s relation to oneself — purchases the pornographic magazine or video, a further compression. The centerfold is abstracted even further, and _it is at this level that the consumer begins to interact with the image._

"This concentric level of reduction effects the same problem as a copy of a copy of a copy. Information is lost as one gets further away from the original representation (i.e., reality)."

— "The centerfold as renegade in both feminism and fascism," novapsyche's spot (Substack), August 4, 2024
https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/the-centerfold-as-renegade-in-both

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Dec 12

The MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) [sample], for reference: geriatrictoolkit.missouri.edu/cog/MoCA-8.3...

Sample of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test. Domains tested include: Visuospatial / Executive (alphanumeric sequence tracing, copying of abstract object, drawing of a clock specifying 10:05); Naming of commonly recognized animals; Memory (five random words to be repeated later in the test); Attention (repetition of a string of numbers in forward order, another numeric string in reverse order, tapping in recognition of a specified letter, then serial subtraction from a set value); Language (repetition of two sentences, a task to list in a span of time as many words beginning with a given letter); Abstraction (find the relationship between two words / concepts); Delayed Recall (retest of Memory words); Orientation (specify date, month, year, day, place, and city where test is being administered).

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Dec 11

The OP (rightaboutnow2) didn't like what I had to say, it appears, and blocked me. But I was able to capture the post for reference:

"Ideology is important. In fact, it is more than party or just change. Obama ran in 2008 as someone he was not. People warned us that his ideology was toxic but his charisma and his ties to Jeremiah Wright had me vote for him. He spent 8 years doing nothing and priming people to vote for Trump."

-- rightaboutnow2, Bluesky post, December 8, 2025

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Oct 1

I wrote a piece about his debility last May. It's long but there's a TL;DR at the end. It may shed some light. novapsyche.substack.com/p/broke-brai...

"Trump was spirited to Walter Reed because his life was in such danger. We don’t know all the details, but we can presume that in such dire straits Trump probably suffered from hypoxemia, or low oxygen in blood. This is a systemic reduction in oxygen levels, not just being acutely cut off from air supply but rather a state that would require concerted efforts to reverse.

"_This damaged him._ Now, as president, Trump would have received the highest quality of care, so I’m sure doctors did everything they could to effect an intervention. Yet the cascade of ill effects in various organ systems, including the brain, would have continued for some time before they leveled out and began to improve.

"Some of those processes may have started a chain reaction in which effects might still be reverberating. This is the human body we’re talking about. It’s not indestructible."

— "Broke-brain Mountain" (Substack essay), May 7, 2025

novapsyche@novapsyche444· Sep 23

As Xavier Márquez said in "The Mechanisms of Cult Production" (2017), these displays of loyalty get costlier and costlier:

$"In order to encourage distinctions between those genuinely committed and opportunists, leaders may thus encourage ever more elaborate displays of flattery—in essence increasing the 'cost' people must pay to signal their loyalty—while the very scarcity of rewards may in any case incentivize individuals to produce such displays.… Those wishing to present themselves as genuinely loyal must then spend more effort increasing the 'signaling value' of their cult artifacts, which often involves the production of ever more extravagant or unbelievable flattery…. "The early period of the Cultural Revolution in China is particularly abundant in examples of this inflationary dynamic. Highly committed Red Guards established an expectation that ordinary people needed to visibly show support for Mao (and recognize his extraordinary qualities) to avoid harassment or worse. This expectation in turn incentivized ordinary people to memorize quotations from the 'Little Red Book', to participate in spontaneous displays of support for Mao, like 'loyalty dances', or to wear Mao badges. At the same time, Red Guards competed among themselves to show their radicalism and commitment to Mao, leading them to punish ever more minor infractions of the norm. The overall effect of this process was to ratchet upwards the effort required to be safe from harassment, and to devalue common signals of support over time. For example, when everyone wore Mao badges, wearing them became less credible as a signal that the person genuinely and sufficiently recognized Mao’s charismatic authority. People wishing to 'stand out' for their commitment to Mao (earning the rewards for this commitment, or avoiding the punishments for insufficient respect) thus started to wear more badges, or larger badges, or to wear these badges directly on their skin." — Xavier Márquez, "The Mechanics of Cult Production" (2017), p. 8$