A Coordinated Mindf* in Plain Sight?

They’re Not Hiding the Truth. They’re Drowning You in It.

I’m mindf***ed. No, not in the cute, internet way. In the nervous-system way. The kind where you’ve consumed so many timelines you can’t tell whether you’re informed or just inflamed.

Demons don’t terrify me anymore. I commune with them in a 3:00 a.m. ritual where I try to write by not trying to write.

There is the demon of self-doubt, whispering that I cannot possibly do this. There is the demon of ignorance, telling me I do not have the answers to what’s ailing our nation, so why bother. Tonight I was scrolling through YouTube timelines trying to catch a thesis I could hold in my hands, and the voices got louder.

Every thumbnail was a tiny dopamine hit of insanity that left me numb. I didn’t feel rage. I didn’t feel sadness. I didn’t feel much of anything. Exhaustion, maybe. This is not the first time it’s happened, but I couldn’t put a name on it.

Then I remembered something I keep learning the hard way. When I stop chasing the answer head-on and let my mind drift toward something that looks unrelated, the pressure breaks. The mind loosens its grip. Something in me starts talking back, not like a solution handed down, but like guidance that refuses to do my work for me. Like the demons changed outfits. Like they stopped heckling and started pointing.

The last few times it was a movie that did it. This time it was music.

As soon as the melody came through the speakers, smooth R&B, quiet storm, chord progressions that sound like Baptist church, vocal arrangements built on call-and-response straight out of choir, I remembered what the blues is doing inside R&B. It’s not just a genre. It’s a method. A mental attempt to reconcile one sentence with the world we actually live in.

All roads lead to Rome, they say. In this case, all roads lead to “all men were created equal.”

That phrase is the spell. The blues was born from trying to break it open without going insane.

The 2015 Pivot

I kept hearing that line in my head from the video, almost like somebody tapping a glass. People swear everything changed in 2020 because it sounds neat. “2020 vision.” Clean little meme for a messy reality. But the video insists, and my body agrees, that the real turn was earlier. 2015. Not because a single app flipped a switch overnight, but because that’s when all the ingredients finally mixed and started acting like a drug.

The phone arrived in 2007. Cool. A tool. A marvel. Then Netflix streaming shows up in the same era. Cool again. Convenience. But convenience is not possession. Possession is when the tool stops being something you use and becomes the room you live inside. The video makes that point in its own casual way. Things did not change overnight. It took time for the new world to become normal. It took time for the new world to become invisible.

I felt that invisibility tonight. I was scrolling like a lab rat pressing a lever. Not because I wanted pleasure, but because I wanted relief. I wanted a feeling. Any feeling. And the thumbnails kept promising it and never delivering. The absurdity was not even shocking anymore. It was just content. It was just another bright rectangle. Another little pellet.

So listen, when I say “experiment,” I do not mean some secret committee with a whiteboard and an evil laugh. I mean something more banal and more terrifying. I mean a business model that discovered the shortest path to human attention, then scaled it until the nation’s inner life started glitching.

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TL;DR

• The claim: This ain’t some mass cover-up. It’s a mass mindf***. Not hidden truth, but engineered overload that leaves you numb, jumpy, and easier to steer.

• The pivot year: Somewhere around 2015, the screen stopped being a tool and became the room we live in. The edges disappeared. The psyche stopped getting silence.

• The symptom: Doomscrolling doesn’t make you “informed.” It makes you inflamed, then emptied. Tugged, then numb.

• The deeper pattern: Social media can trap a whole nation inside one dominant complex, and Trump’s psychic weather became the weather report everyone checks.

• The counter-move: You don’t beat this with more content. You beat it by reclaiming tempo. Music helped me name it. Your exit might be different.

If this hits, Restack it. Restacks aren’t just love, they’re distribution. They tell the algorithm this isn’t disposable, and they help it travel farther than my little corner of Substack.

And if you’re a free subscriber, thank you. You’re already part of the backbone. If you’ve got the resources to go paid, that support helps me keep doing this work consistently, and it helps keep posts available for folks on fixed incomes.

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The video From Jack Morgan lays out the timeline in plain language. The iPhone did not scramble our souls by itself. Streaming did not either. The tipping point came when we stopped having to choose when to enter the world of screens. The screen started traveling with us. It started filling silence. It started colonizing boredom. It started turning every stray moment into a chance to check, refresh, compare, react.

Then Instagram adds video in 2013. One more feature. One more upgrade. Nothing to panic about, right. Except upgrades are never neutral. They are invitations. They are nudges. They teach you what to want. They teach you what to crave. They teach you what counts as real.

By 2015, the culture had absorbed the lesson. The new normal was not “watch this show.” The new normal was “live inside the stream.” Not just media consumption, but identity consumption. Not just news, but mood. Not just entertainment, but a steady drip of social comparison, humiliation, lust, outrage, envy, and righteousness. All of it packaged as choice. All of it disguised as freedom.

Here is the part that matters for this thesis. Once the mind is trained to chase micro-hits all day, it becomes easier to steer. You do not even have to lie convincingly. You just have to flood the zone with stimulation. Contradict yourself. Pivot. Escalate. Offend. Deny. Repeat. The goal is not coherence. The goal is dominance. The goal is to keep everyone’s attention tethered to your nervous system.

That is where Trump enters the story, not just as a politician but as a psychic event.

A nation can get trapped in a person’s psychosis the way a family can. Anyone who has lived with a volatile parent knows what I mean. The household begins to revolve around the parent’s mood. Everyone learns the weather. Everyone starts scanning for signs. Everyone adjusts. The parent’s inner chaos becomes the family’s calendar.

Social media took that family dynamic and nationalized it.

Trump does not just generate headlines. He generates atmosphere. He generates a reality field. His mind is not organized around shared truth. It is organized around domination, humiliation, spectacle, and grievance. It runs on accusation and counter-accusation. It runs on doubling down. It runs on the thrill of breaking norms and watching people try to make sense of it.

That’s how it feels like psychosis. Not because everyone is clinically psychotic, but because we are living inside a reality that is constantly being forced to accept contradictions. You see it. You name it. Then you are told it did not happen. You are shown evidence. Then you are told the evidence is the crime. You watch the rules bend. Then you are told nothing is bending. Your nervous system stays activated because it cannot find a stable ground.

And the feed makes it worse because it keeps rewarding the most dysregulating version of the story. The clip that enrages you. The rumor that tempts you. The outrage that bonds your side. The humiliation that fuels the other side. Every reaction becomes a signal. Every signal becomes a product.

So when I say “mass psychosis,” I mean this: a collective trance where the nation’s attention is captured by one dominant complex, and the complex keeps reproducing itself through the algorithm. We are not just arguing about Trump. We are living in his emotional logic. We are rehearsing his psychic script, either in devotion or in disgust. Either way, we are still orbiting.

And once you realize that, you can finally name the numbness.

It is not that you do not care. It is that your caring has been harvested. It is that your feeling has been broken into pellets and sold back to you. It is that the constant stimulation has turned your inner life into a scrolling gesture.

That is why the music felt like a rescue. The blues does not flood the zone. The blues holds the contradiction and refuses to lie about it. The blues gives the psyche a container strong enough to feel pain without turning it into spectacle.

That is what I am trying to do here. Not win an argument. Not out-research anybody. Just build a container sturdy enough to feel what has been done to us since 2015, and to name how one man’s psychosis found a nation already trained to live inside the feed.

The Scenes That Prove the Trance

I can tell you exactly when I first felt it, even if I could not explain it at the time.

2015 did not arrive with fireworks. It arrived with little moments that felt harmless. Standing in line somewhere, head down, thumb moving. Sitting at a red light, not present, not absent, just suspended. Watching a conversation drift toward the phone like gravity. Nobody announced it. Nobody voted on it. We just quietly agreed to live inside a second room that was always open.

Back then, I still thought the internet was a place you visited. You logged on. You logged off. It had edges. It had a beginning and an end. Then the edges dissolved. The feed followed you into the bathroom, into the bed, into the five minutes before work, into the five minutes after an argument, into the space that used to belong to boredom, prayer, or a plain old stare at the wall.

And boredom ain’t just nothing. Boredom is where the psyche digests the day. Boredom is where the unconscious gets a turn at the microphone. When you steal boredom, you do not just fill time. You interrupt assimilation. You interrupt the inner housekeeping that keeps a person from becoming a raw nerve.

That’s the first scene.

Here’s the second scene, and it’s uglier because it implicates me. The way I check Trump news is not the way I check news. It’s the way a child checks the hallway for footsteps. It is the way a spouse checks the temperature of a volatile partner. It is the way a family learns to read the sky. Not curiosity. Vigilance.

You call it staying informed. You call it paying attention. But the body tells the truth. Shoulders up. Jaw tight. Stomach braced. That little click that feels like control but is really a compulsion. You are not looking for information. You are looking for a signal that the world is still coherent.

And the signal never comes.

Instead you get whiplash. Contradiction. Denial. Escalation. Outrage. A new headline that makes the last one feel quaint. If you are for him, it feels like exhilaration. If you are against him, it feels like dread. Either way, your nervous system stays on duty.

That’s how a volatile parent captures a household. The parent does not have to touch you to control you. They just have to be unpredictable. Unpredictability is power. Everybody starts organizing their day around it. Everybody starts anticipating. Everybody starts reacting. And the child forgets what it feels like to live from their own center.

Social media scaled that dynamic. It made unpredictability profitable. It made humiliation shareable. It made rage a community activity. It made fear a subscription.

That’s the second scene.

Now the third scene is what happens after you’ve done it for too long.

You would think constant outrage would make you angrier. Sometimes it does. But more often it makes you numb. The nervous system can’t stay in emergency mode indefinitely. So it flips. It goes from activated to shut down. That is not peace. That is collapse.

That’s what happened to me in that 3:00 a.m. ritual. I was scrolling and I wasn’t feeling anything. Not because I’m above it. Because I’m inside it. I wasn’t feeling rage. I wasn’t feeling sadness. I wasn’t even feeling shock. Just a flat, tired emptiness. The kind of exhaustion that makes a person wonder if they are losing their soul, when really they are losing their capacity to metabolize the endless stimulus.

And that is where the phrase “mass psychosis” starts to earn its keep.

Because what you’re watching is not just political conflict. It’s a national alteration of consciousness. A trance. A shared spell. Not one delusion everyone believes, but one emotional logic everyone is forced to breathe. The logic is simple. Everything is urgent. Nothing is stable. Somebody is always lying. Somebody is always cheating. Somebody is always coming for you. Stay alert. Keep scrolling. Keep reacting. Keep choosing a side.

That is not citizenship. That is captivity.

So what do you do with that, if you are not trying to write a research paper and you are not trying to perform as the smartest person in the room.

You do what the blues did.

You slow it down. You return the psyche to a tempo it can actually hold. You take the contradiction and you let it sit in the room without turning it into spectacle. You tell the truth about how it feels, then you build a container strong enough to survive it.

That’s the next move I’m making in this essay.

I’m going to stop trying to beat the feed at its own game. I’m going to stop letting the algorithm decide what I feel first. I’m going to use the blues as a method to name what happened to us after 2015, and to name how Trump’s psychosis found a nation already trained, already primed, already exhausted.

Not a cover-up. A mindf***.

And the first step out of a spell is learning how to describe it without flinching.

Any Exit Will Do

Let me say this before we go any further. It doesn’t have to be R&B. I’m not starting a church where the ushers pat you down at the door and confiscate your rock records. It can be rock. It can be country. It can be jazz. It can even be classical, if that’s your medicine. If you want to get ridiculous, fine, let’s talk yacht rock. If Michael McDonald is what gets you out of a trance, then bless the boat and pass the communion wafers. It can be meditation. It can be silence. It can be a long walk where your phone stays home like it lost privileges.

The point is not the genre. The point is the exit.

Because once you step out of the feed long enough to feel your own pulse again, you start noticing the loop. Not the political loop. The psychological loop. The trance mechanics.

Here’s how it works in the body.

First comes the provocation. Something absurd on purpose. Something insulting. Something that dares you to respond. It hits the feed and spreads instantly because it’s engineered to activate the oldest parts of the brain. Threat. Status. Belonging. Humiliation. Then comes the outrage. Yours, theirs, everybody’s. And the outrage feels like clarity for about fifteen seconds. It feels like you’re awake.

Then comes the denial. The walk-back. The “I never said that.” The “you misunderstood.” The “fake news.” The “they’re persecuting me.” You watch reality get bent in public. Not hidden. Not whispered. Performed. And because it’s performed, it doesn’t just challenge a fact. It challenges the idea that facts matter.

Then comes the exhaustion. Because the mind can’t keep re-litigating reality all day. So it does what minds do under relentless stress. It collapses into numbness.

And that numbness is the true prize. That is the end state.

A tired public is a pliable public. A numb public is an easily managed public. A public that can’t feel is a public that can’t organize. People who are overwhelmed don’t unite. They isolate. They doomscroll. They look away. They pick a team and call it identity. They confuse noise for participation.

This is where I’m going to be very direct about what I mean when I say we’re trapped in Trump’s psychosis.

I do not mean everyone is hallucinating. I mean the country has been forced to live inside a reality field that runs on compulsive reality-bending, humiliation as entertainment, and domination as a form of speech. Trump doesn’t just lie. Plenty of politicians lie. Trump creates whiplash. Trump creates the sensation that nothing is stable, not language, not norms, not consequences. He floods the zone until the average person starts treating truth like a preference.

That’s a psychological environment, not a debate.

And social media is the delivery system. It doesn’t just report the psychosis. It amplifies it. It rewards it. It slices it into clips and hashtags and reactions, then sells it back to us as if we are choosing it. We are not choosing it. We are being trained by it.

Here’s the part that may hit different coming from me, because I spent years with a nervous system trained for threat assessment in law enforcement. The job teaches you to scan. You read faces. You read hands. You read waistbands. You read tone. You read the room. You learn to anticipate the moment when things go left.

That training is useful in a real-world encounter where the threat resolves. You de-escalate or you act. Either way, the moment ends.

The feed never ends.

So the threat-assessment machine stays on, but it never gets closure. It never gets resolution. It never gets to stand down. It just keeps scanning. Refresh. Scan. Refresh. Scan. And the longer you do it, the more it changes you. You start living like the danger is always imminent, even when you’re sitting on your couch. You start feeling like you’re “being responsible,” when really you’re being conditioned.

That’s how a nation gets captured. Not by one lie. By an endless loop that turns citizens into exhausted spectators.

So let’s make this practical, not just poetic.

If you want to test whether you’re in a trance, do one small thing for 24 hours. Pick one intentional exit and do it like an experiment on yourself. One day. That’s it.

Choose your medicine. A single album. A single symphony. A ten-minute meditation. A walk with no phone. A kitchen ritual where you cook and the feed doesn’t get invited. Yacht rock, if that’s your rebellious path to freedom. The point is to give your nervous system proof that it can live without being tugged every thirty seconds.

Because once you feel what “off” feels like again, you can see the loop more clearly.

Provocation. Outrage. Denial. Exhaustion. Numbness.

And then you can do what the blues has always taught people to do. Slow the tempo. Tell the truth. Hold the contradiction. Refuse the spell.

Not because you’re above the chaos, but because you’re tired of renting your mind to it.

Section 5: The Quiet Part Out Loud

Here’s where I have to say the quiet part out loud. This isn’t a mass cover-up. It’s a mass mindf***, and it works because it doesn’t need to convince you of one clean lie. It only needs to keep you in a state where you can’t hold a thought long enough to act on it.

That’s why the “Trump psychosis” framing matters. The spell is not that he says something false. The spell is that reality gets treated like a toy you can bend in public, then dare everyone else to argue about the bend instead of the hand doing the bending. The feed doesn’t just deliver the chaos. It turns chaos into a daily reflex, a shared habit, a national posture.

And this is also why the Don Lemon situation matters, even in passing. Not because one journalist is the whole story, but because the mere fact that a figure of that stature can be arrested and publicly treated like a problem to be managed is a cultural signal. It teaches every smaller outlet, every freelancer, every young reporter, every “nobody” with a camera, that the boundary between reporting and punishment can be made to feel negotiable. In a healthy society, that boundary is not negotiable. It’s sacred.

So when you put these pieces together, the shape of the trap becomes visible.

The trap is not just misinformation. It’s nervous-system management. It’s selective enforcement. It’s ritual humiliation. It’s contradiction served at high speed. It’s the steady training of a population to live in reaction mode. You don’t even have to censor people when you can exhaust them into silence.

That’s the move. That’s the mindf***.

Now I’m going to make a simple claim, and I’m going to stake my name on it. If you want your mind back, you have to reclaim tempo. You have to reclaim silence. You have to reclaim a place inside yourself that does not answer every bell the feed rings.

For me, that place is music. For you it might be prayer. It might be lifting weights. It might be a walk at the same time every day. It might be ten minutes of sitting with your breath like you’re re-learning how to live in your own body. Whatever the method, the point is the same. The exit is not about becoming uninformed. The exit is about becoming un-hijackable.

Because the real resistance, before the marches and the votes and the arguments and the posts, is this. Refusing to let someone else’s psychosis become your climate. Refusing to let the feed teach you what to feel first. Refusing to rent your attention to a system that profits when you cannot think.

And once you can feel again, the next steps get simpler.

You stop mistaking stimulation for truth.

You stop mistaking outrage for agency.

You stop mistaking numbness for peace.

You come back to the slow, old work the blues has always been doing for people like us. Telling the truth about the contradiction, without surrendering your mind to it.

Conclusion

So here’s where I’m gonna land this thing.

It’s 3:00 a.m. again. Same house. Same quiet. Same hungry little urge to reach for the feed like it’s a flashlight. And I know what that urge is now. It’s not curiosity. It’s not “staying informed.” It’s a nervous system looking for relief in the very machine that keeps it itchy.

That’s the mindf***. Not that they hid the truth. That they trained us to live without rest, without digestion, without the kind of silence where a thought can finish its sentence.

And yes, I’m saying “they” on purpose, but I’m not talking about a smoky back room. I’m talking about a system that figured out how to monetize your attention the way casinos monetize hope. Pull the lever. Refresh. Pull it again. Feel something. Anything. Then go numb. Then do it again.

But that night, the spell broke for a second.

Music came in, and it didn’t argue with me. Music came in, and it didn’t perform. Music came in, and It didn’t bait me. It didn’t demand a reaction. It just held me. It gave me tempo. It gave me breath. It put my feet back on the ground long enough for one plain truth to rise up.

We are not living in a shared reality anymore. We are living inside a stimulation field.

That’s why a country can get trapped in one man’s psychosis. Not because we all believe the same lie, but because the environment keeps us keyed up, divided, reactive, suggestible. It keeps us orbiting. It keeps us watching. It keeps us arguing about the smoke while the fire rearranges the room. And when you can arrest a journalist like Don Lemon and turn it into spectacle, and half the country shrugs because they’re too exhausted to feel the danger, that’s not normal. That’s conditioning.

So I’m not ending this with a grand plan. I’m ending it with a human move. A small one. The kind that sounds almost too simple to matter, which is exactly why it matters.

For the next 24 hours, reclaim your tempo.

Pick one intentional exit. One.

A single album. A hymn. A guitar solo. A symphony. Ten minutes of sitting still. A walk with your phone left behind like it lost privileges. Something that returns you to your own pulse.

And while you do it, pay attention to one thing. Not the news. Not the arguments. Not the hot takes.

Pay attention to what it feels like when your mind is not being yanked around.

Because once you remember that feeling, you can start telling the difference between information and manipulation. Between urgency and bait. Between civic attention and psychic captivity.

The feed wants you reactive. The blues wants you honest.

The feed wants you fast. The soul wants you whole.

That’s all I’m offering tonight. Not a sermon to make you feel righteous. A way to get your mind back.

And if you can get your mind back, even for a day, you can start building a life that no algorithm can live for you.

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