I’ve known and agreed about Trump’s obvious clinical narcissism, but I needed to hear this last piece: the ineptitude and culpability of the media in not just facilitating it, but actively contributing to what in any other circumstance would be systematic abuse. It’s so messed up that they are exposing us to, and amplifying, his mental illness without any self-reflection or caution.
For reference, I also had a relationship with someone with BPD. I had to go no-contact after she took a bottle of pills, and then tried to time a call to me so she could die on the phone while I was powerless to stop it. (The ambulance got there in time.) It wasn’t until months later that I realized just how exhausted I had been, and how much it was harming me. Feels familiar.
I think it’s just the overall tightening of the right wing echo chamber. Yes, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all create spaces for right-wing chauvinists to capture young men when they are most impressionable and feel least seen.
But also these are dividends from Fox News slowly poisoning discourse and rural communities treating being liberal or left as an immoral betrayal of your kin and kind. For those people, being conservative is seen as being sane and the natural state of things, and no amount of facts or cognitive dissonance can influence those communities to change.
The only way to reverse it is to find a way to prevent those top-down right-wing spaces from engaging in propaganda. But not only is that difficult with the First Amendment, we haven’t even politically acknowledged what is happening.
Conservatives still gaslight and play the victims while exerting excessive influence on our discourse. The left continues to treat them with kid gloves, which only emboldens them. So I expect this trend to fully continue.