Before power captures institutions, it captures perception.
Democracy does not collapse in a single dramatic seizure. It erodes when citizens no longer share a coherent reality. When people inhabit different informational worlds, self-government becomes nearly impossible.
This is not accidental. It is engineered.
And it begins in the mind.
In psychology, apperception describes how new information is absorbed through existing mental frameworks. We do not see the world as it is. We see it through the models we have already built. Every experience is filtered, interpreted, and woven into prior belief.
When those mental models are distorted, reality itself becomes pliable.
The defining political struggle of our era is not merely about laws or elections. It is about perception.
What happens to democracy when perception itself is privatized?
The Manufacturing of Reality: Social Media Is Training Us to Obey
We Already Perceive Only a Fractionof the Manufactured Reality Swirling Around Us
Modern physics offers a humbling insight: human perception is inherently partial.
Quantum mechanics reveals that observation affects what is observed. String theory proposes that what we experience may be a thin “brane” floating within a far larger “bulk” of dimensions beyond our sensory reach. Whether one takes these models literally or metaphorically, the lesson is clear: reality is deeper and more complex than our immediate awareness.
We are always navigating a thin perceptual membrane stretched across something vastly larger.
Healthy societies expand that membrane. They cultivate curiosity, humility, and cognitive flexibility. They encourage citizens to refine their models of reality as new information emerges.
But what happens when the informational environment becomes saturated with noise?
Instead of expanding perception, we flood it.
Twenty-four-hour media cycles. Algorithmic reinforcement. Outrage as currency. Endless scroll. Contradiction layered upon contradiction.
When the signal-to-noise ratio collapses, people do not become more discerning.
They become fatigued.
And fatigue narrows perception.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Image from Another Reality Is Leaking into Ours
Lenin: Capture the Narrative First (The Manufacturing of Reality Is Old)
Vladimir Lenin understood that revolutions are won in the realm of narrative before they are secured in the realm of governance.
Control the story, and you control interpretation. Control interpretation, and you shape allegiance.
If every event is filtered through a single ideological lens, complexity disappears. Alternative explanations become suspect. Dissent becomes betrayal.
Once perception is reorganized, resistance feels irrational. The new order feels inevitable.
The first victory is cognitive.
Hitler: Replace Reality with Myth (The Manufacturing of Reality Is Repetitive)
Adolf Hitler refined this strategy by fusing mythic identity with grievance.
Hero. Enemy. Betrayal. Destiny.
These are archetypal structures. They bypass analytical reasoning and move directly into emotional circuitry. Facts lose relevance because belonging becomes paramount.
Myth simplifies a chaotic world. It offers clarity where complexity feels overwhelming. It offers identity where economic instability erodes dignity.
When myth overtakes shared reality, institutions weaken. Courts, legislatures, journalism — these depend on a baseline agreement about what is real. Remove that baseline, and democratic structure becomes hollow.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Hitler’s Bunker (Remind you of anyone today obsessed with death, destruction, and bunkers?)
Trump: Saturation as Strategy (The Manufacturing of Reality: Still Happening Now)
Donald Trump operates in a different media ecosystem — one defined not by centralized propaganda but by fragmentation and saturation.
The strategy is not uniformity.
It is overload.
Constant statements. Contradictions. Provocations. Breaking news layered upon breaking news. The informational field becomes so dense that evaluation becomes exhausting.
When everything demands attention, sustained attention collapses.
Exhaustion becomes compliance.
This is not merely personality or spectacle. It is perceptual warfare in an age where attention is the most valuable commodity.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Little King Trump
Economic Stress Narrows the Mind, an Essential Ingredient in the Manufacturing of Reality
Economic precarity intensifies this dynamic.
Research on scarcity shows that when individuals are preoccupied with financial insecurity, cognitive bandwidth shrinks. Immediate survival crowds out long-term reasoning. Abstract policy debates lose urgency compared to rent, food, healthcare.
Under chronic stress:
Simplified narratives feel stabilizing.
Strong leaders feel clarifying.
Identifiable enemies feel grounding.
The mind narrows because it must.
A narrowed mind is easier to guide.
This is not a moral failing. It is a cognitive reality.
And it makes perceptual manipulation more effective.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Always Involves Corruption and Income Inequality
The Loss of Interior Expansion
There was a time in Western intellectual history when alternative cosmologies emphasized interior awakening. Early Gnostic traditions, later marginalized and pruned from orthodoxy, suggested that reality is layered — and that human beings possess the capacity to awaken beyond surface appearances.
Whether one accepts those metaphysics literally is beside the point.
Psychologically, such traditions cultivated depth. They encouraged inward exploration alongside outward structure.
Much of Western civilization instead consolidated around more hierarchical metaphysical models: authority centralized, truth mediated, salvation externalized. Over centuries, this narrowed the manuscript of the mind.
In a universe that physics now describes as multidimensional and probabilistic, our cultural habits often remain rigid and binary.
We stare at the brane and forget the bulk.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Inner Space
The Privatization of Perception, Critical Ingredient in the Manufacturing of Reality
Today, perception is no longer shaped only by culture, family, or local community.
It is curated.
Algorithms — owned and operated by private corporations — determine what rises into visibility and what sinks into obscurity. They optimize for engagement, not coherence. For emotional activation, not contemplative depth.
The result is fragmentation.
Different citizens inhabit different informational universes. Shared reference points dissolve. A common civic narrative becomes difficult to sustain.
Democracy requires an informational commons. It requires enough overlap in perception that disagreement can occur within a shared frame.
When perception itself is privatized, the commons erodes.
The danger is not disagreement.
The danger is epistemic isolation.
The Manufacturing of Reality: The Art of Confusion
Noise Versus Signal, You Must Know the Different to Avoid Getting Caught Up in the Manufacturing of Reality
The deeper cost of this manufactured reality is not simply political instability.
It is human diminishment.
When attention is perpetually captured, individuals lose access to their own interior signal. Reflection is replaced by reaction. Depth is replaced by immediacy.
Discoherent noise overwhelms the perceptual membrane.
And when that happens, people forget who they are — and what they are capable of becoming.
Democracy is not sustained by outrage alone. It is sustained by citizens capable of sustained thought, capable of soft focus, capable of seeing beyond the immediate stimulus.
In martial arts, instructors speak of using “soft eyes” — widening the field of vision rather than locking onto a single threat. Soft eyes allow you to perceive the whole field.
Hard focus is useful in crisis.
But permanent hard focus leads to blindness.
A society trapped in permanent hard focus — outrage, fear, reaction — loses its depth perception.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Ordinary People Trapped In a Rage Machine and Economic Deprivation
Expanding the Perceptual Field
The defense of democracy is inseparable from the defense of consciousness.
This does not require ideological conformity. It requires cognitive expansion.
Strengthening apperception rather than surrendering it. Restoring signal amid noise. Reclaiming interior depth in a saturated world. Widening the brane.
Power trains the mind before it takes the state. It reshapes narrative before it reshapes law. It narrows perception before it narrows rights.
The counter-movement must therefore begin in perception as well.
Slow down the feed. Diversify sources. Engage opposing arguments without caricature. Create spaces for sustained conversation. Practice soft eyes.
Because the most radical act in an age of manufactured reality may be this:
To expand your awareness rather than contract it.
Democracy depends on citizens who can tolerate complexity without fleeing into myth. Citizens who can endure uncertainty without surrendering to authoritarian clarity. Citizens who recognize that their perception is partial — and who remain willing to refine it.
We inhabit only a fraction of reality.
The question is whether we will allow that fraction to be engineered for us.
Or whether we will widen it ourselves.
Before power captures the state, it captures the mind.
The preservation of democracy begins by reclaiming it.
The Manufacturing of Reality: Visualization of Mind and Thought as Resonance and Waves
The Manufacturing of Reality: Feature Archetypal Animation
Music: Pulse of the Feed 03:10 StabilityMid-tempo (80–95 BPM) cinematic ambient electronica with pulsing synth bass, soft glitch percussion, airy pads, and sparse piano motifs. Minor-key harmony with subtle tension, occasional filtered risers, no flashy solos. Mood: investigative, uneasy, reflective—building toward clarity and resolve.
If 2024 cracked the illusion, 2025 tore it open. To make a prediction of the future, understanding the past is crucial.
This was the year when power stopped pretending it was benevolent, neutral, or even rational. Across politics, media, technology, and global affairs, institutions abandoned the last remnants of moral language and replaced it with something colder: efficiency, dominance, and narrative control.
Three truths became unavoidable in 2025:
1. Authoritarianism Stopped Whispering
Strongman politics no longer needed coded language or plausible deniability. Loyalty tests replaced competence. Intellectual friction was treated as treason. History was rewritten openly, not quietly.
What had once been described as “norm erosion” revealed itself as something more direct: a belief that constraint itself is illegitimate.
This wasn’t new—but the denial ended.
This topic was explored in December's blog: A King Like Trump: Herod the Great where the myth of the “necessary ruler” fully replaced the idea of shared governance, in the case of Trump, and for Herod, seeking legitimacy from the people he ruled destroyed him and left the indelible mark on his legacy of the brutal, corrupt king who tried to kill the baby Jesus.
Prediction 2026 | A King like Trump: Herod the Great
2. Capitalism’s Shadow Stepped Fully Into the Light
By 2025, neoliberalism could no longer plausibly describe itself as an economic system alone. It revealed itself as a psychological operating system—one that trains individuals to self-optimize, self-blame, and self-erode while power consolidates upward.
Marketing, politics, and identity collapsed into a single feedback loop:
Consume → perform → obey → repeat.
Trumpism was no longer an anomaly. It was recognized—by supporters and critics alike—as capitalism’s shadow made flesh. One stripped of civility, decorum, and restraint and operating without apology.
Prediction 2026 | The Monsters We Choose to Be
3. Consciousness Became the Real Battleground
2025 wasn’t primarily about elections or wars. It was about perception.
Who controls:
attention
memory
fear
meaning
Book bans, algorithmic suppression, AI-generated mythmaking, and the quiet erasure of inconvenient voices all pointed to the same conclusion:
Reality itself is now contested territory.
And yet—something else happened.
While power centralized, awareness decentralized. People didn’t suddenly agree, but many began to recognize manipulation as it was happening.
Prediction 2026 &The Counter-Movement No One Could Fully Contain
Prediction 2026 | The Counter-Movement
While power centralized, awareness decentralized.
2025 saw a quiet but unmistakable rise in:
whistle-thinkers rather than whistleblowers
cross-disciplinary truth tellers
elders refusing to be dismissed
autistic, sensitive, and highly perceptive minds finally naming what they see
People didn’t suddenly agree—but they began to recognize manipulation when they felt it.
This recognition—uneven, fragile, incomplete—may prove more important than consensus.
2026: Is This the Year of Fracture or Awakening
Prediction 2026 | 2026 will not be a year of stability.
It will be a year of choice.
Because it will be a year of overreach—and reaction.
Here are the patterns already locked in motion:
Prediction #1: Power Will Overreach—Openly
Authoritarian systems always do. The pressure to maintain narrative dominance will produce increasingly absurd contradictions, harsher loyalty demands, and more visible incompetence.
This will wake some people up. It will radicalize others. There will be no middle ground left to hide in.
Historically, authoritarian systems do not collapse because they are challenged.
They collapse because they overextend, as we are exploring in my podcast Wisdom Guardians.
As 2026 begins, we are already seeing signs of this dynamic:
escalating executive claims unconstrained by Congress or international law
rhetoric of regime change treated as casual policy discourse
open talk of territorial expansion, annexation, or “running” other nations
the normalization of militarized solutions to complex political failures
Whether every threat materializes is almost beside the point.
What matters is this shift:
Power is signaling that it no longer recognizes meaningful limits.
This is not merely “Trump being Trump.” It reflects a deeper fracture: when institutions fail to impose boundaries, leaders test how far reality can be bent before it breaks.
History is clear on what follows.
Such overreach does not produce submission alone. It produces counter-forces:
diplomatic isolation
internal resistance
fractures within alliances
destabilization that cannot be fully controlled
The irony of domination is that the harder it grips, the more instability it creates.
Empire, Resources, and the Old Justifications
Drilling down a little deeper on this long established, destructive, historical pattern, the renewed language of regime change and territorial ambition also resurrects an older logic—one the modern world claims to have outgrown.
These arguments have justified interventions for more than a century. When leaders speak openly about oil, minerals, or strategic territory while dismissing sovereignty and law, they are not innovating. They are repeating a script whose consequences are well documented.
What has changed is not the logic—but the willingness to state it plainly.
That candor may feel powerful in the moment. It is also how nations drift toward pariah status: not because they lack power, but because they abandon legitimacy.
Prediction #2: AI Will Accelerate Myth—or Meaning
AI in 2026 will be used in two radically different ways:
to mass-produce comforting illusions
or to reveal patterns humans were never meant to ignore
The danger is not that humans will merge with machines. The danger is that we will do so without consciousness, repeating domination at a higher speed.
AI isn’t replacing humans. Rather, humans are surrendering authorship of their inner world to AI and the doctrine of silence commanded by corrupted systems.
Those who treat AI as an oracle will hollow out.
Those who treat it as a partner—within ethical bounds—may sharpen perception rather than surrender it.
Prediction #3: Burnout Will Become Political
Exhaustion is no longer personal—it’s systemic.
By mid-2026, withdrawal, refusal, and non-participation will increasingly function as forms of resistance. Not everyone will protest. Many will simply stop performing obedience.
That quiet refusal will frighten power more than spectacle ever did.
Prediction 2026: The Choice That Remains
Prediction 2026 | 2026 will ask a single, uncomfortable question:
Do you want comfort—or consciousness?
You don’t get both anymore.
The age of plausible deniability is over. The age of spectatorship is ending. What comes next depends not on heroes or rulers—but on whether individuals reclaim their perception, their imagination, and their moral spine.
As I wrote in Sapience: The Moment Is Now:
Survival will not belong to the strongest, the richest, or the loudest— but to those who can still see clearly while others beg to be told what to believe.
2026 is not the end.
It is the threshold.
Prediction 2026 & January 6
The Unresolved Wound
Prediction 2026 | Animation from January 6, 2022 blog
This blog is published on January 6 for a reason.
Five years ago, a sitting U.S. president incited an attack on the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost. The event was broadcast, documented, and partially prosecuted—yet never fully resolved at the level that matters most: accountability at the top.
Instead:
consequences fell unevenly
narratives fractured
responsibility blurred
and justice became selective
When a society fails to metabolize a rupture, it does not disappear. It grows in the shadows and migrates, taking new and more dangerous forms.
Today, we see its echoes:
detention without transparency
disappearances into bureaucratic systems
the erosion of due process for the “undesirable”
historical amnesia about our own concentration camps, burn orders, and sanctioned erasures
war in Venezuela and Iran as well as threats to Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and the rest of “the Western Hemisphere.”
The comparison to past authoritarian regimes is not a claim of equivalence.
It is a warning about patterns.
Power without accountability behaves similarly across history—no matter the flag.
What will you choose?
Compliance?
or
Pattern-Recognition and Reality-Grounded Action Based on Facts?
Rachel Maddowexplores one of the US’s most shocking historical executive orders to round up innocent American Japanese and incarcerate them in concentrate camp-like conditions for years during WWII.
Feature Archetypal Animationfor Prediction 2026
Music 1:Masked Reality Echoes 03:10 StabilitySlow tempo, sustained strings, deep synth pads, occasional dissonant piano chords, and subtle percussive pulses create a suspenseful, thought-provoking mood. No solos.
Music 2: Awakening Echoes 03:10 StabilityA slowly evolving, atmospheric electronic piece. Features ethereal synths, deep sub-bass, and subtle percussive textures. Harmony is minor-key, creating a contemplative yet hopeful mood. Tempo is slow, building gradually without explicit solos.
Music 3: 2026 Crossroads 03:10 StabilityA pulsing, low-tempo electronic beat anchors a spacious soundscape. Synthesizer pads swell with a sense of impending tension, occasionally punctuated by a high-pitched, ethereal melody. No solos. Overall mood is introspective and slightly ominous, building to a hopeful resolve.
Music 4: Threshold of Consciousness 03:10 StabilitySlow, pulsing synth pads create an ethereal yet foreboding atmosphere. A minimalist electronic beat underpins a low, resonant bassline. No solos, harmonies are dark and expansive. Mood is contemplative, unsettling.
Supplemental: The Cost of Honesty
Why the HONEST Child Becomes the Family PROBLEM | Scapegoat Trauma
Honesty is not only punished in dysfunctional families, it is punished in dysfunctional and corrupted systems throughout time and history. Watch this video and when it talks about the dysfunctional family system, substitute dysfunctional society, culture, civilization.
We learn how to stay quiet and not rock the boat in our families. Then, we repeat the pattern in our culture and society. The more people punished for being honest, the fewer people who are willing to speak when families, cultures, civilizations take that fatal turn over the edge of reality, which always happens when lopsidedness is not fixed.
Do you see the pattern repeating again?
Do you think we are doomed?
We are when we stand by and say and do nothing.
Here is a knowledgable, intelligent man who once wore the mantle he inherited from his family of dysfunctional beliefs and silence. He became aware of the lies he had been fed by his family and the systems they inhabited.
Listen to his story.
Then, tell me if you think we are still doomed?
This Ph.D. Physical Therapist and Pastor tells how he was taught to believe lies that were meant to keep him unconscious of what is really going on around him. Lies meant to hide from his conscious ability to reason and detect patterns not to see how the authority figures around him are stealing, demeaning, or betraying anyone considered to be below or beneath them.
I have seen this cruelty in action in my own life through my dad’s life and my mother’s. Both had fathers who were pastors. Both spoke up about violence they had experienced in their homes. Both were label the Black Sheep of their families for being honest about what happened to them. Both were punished for it. Both persisted in being honest despite the tremendous cost of connectivity and acceptance by their families. Both suffered lifetime of feeling alone and unaccepted.
These are terrible costs to pay, and when speaking up and being honest in workplaces and social places means you will be fired from your job for speaking truth to power or targeted by unhinged people who threaten to kill you and your family for speaking truth to power… well, you see why so many people choose silence.
And you see that after 5,000 years of civilization, why we have not evolved very much since organizing into super sized collective systems that must find ways to cooperate and get along and share resources.
I write about this stuff in my book Sapience. I even identify Narcissism as an underlying feature of most modern cultures and economic systems. I trace how this characteristic got favorably selected over thousands of years to become the dominate social trait that is awarded in most modern economic systems and societies.
Here is an expert in narcissism describing what happens when a narcissistic person has not checks placed on them by their structures and systems.
3 TERRIFYING Signs the Narcissist Has Turned Into Pure Evil || Dr Ramani || Learn how to recognize when a narcissist crosses the line from manipulation to truly destructive behavior Discover the psychological and emotional warning signs that indicate a narcissist has become dangerous Understand the patterns of cruelty obsession and control that escalate when narcissists act without conscience Explore why extreme narcissistic behavior often stems from unchecked ego insecurity and fear Learn how to protect yourself emotionally and physically when faced with a narcissist showing these terrifying traits This video explains the critical red flags of a narcissist turning evil and how to maintain boundaries safety and emotional resilience
Evil is real and the darkness of narcissistic people who flipped into the grip of their unconsciousness is destructive. These are people who take pleasure in being cruel to others. They are people who actively try to destroy other people and the world. They are individuals who act like a psychological poison you and the world that they have given up living in as a human being.
Dysfunctional families and systems protect Narcissistic people. They become flying monkeys helping to carry out the daily performance of evil and cruelty. These monkeys are the people who have learned to keep quiet, to not notice the patterns, and to most definitely not state or say the obvious thing: This is wrong.
Saints Need Sinners, An Alan Watts Inspired Tee; wearable Buddhist philosophy, Alan Watts, art wear, inspiring Tees, philosophical T-shirt, Meaningful Shirts
Alan Watts had a gift for turning the world upside down—only to reveal that it had always been that way. He reminded us, again and again, that reality is not divided into neat moral boxes. Light needs shadow. Order needs chaos. Saints need sinners.
The last chapter of Maria’s book is: Why Fascism Is Winning and its subtitle is Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate. She is the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courage and work standing up to President Duterte, 16th President of the Philippines who was elected to the role of the presidency on June 30, 2016 (exactly 6 months after Trump did the same thing in the United States).
Both men went to work attacking the Press. Both men claimed they, and they alone, knew what is right and wrong. Both men labeled any coverage from the press that they didn’t like as Fake News, Unreliable, Unprofessional, Untrue. Both men worked furiously to annihilate truth, facts, and reality. They knew divided we fall!
To some extend, both men succeeded beyond their wildest mad fantasies!
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Duterte’s Mad War
Duterte went to war, he said, to reduce ‘crime, corruption, and illegal drug trade‘. Many cheered. In reality, he would leave a brutal, bloody legacy of dead. Official numbers account that 6,248 people were killed, but human rights groups say the number is much higher, as high as 30,000 people.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Image (GETTY) from BBC article: Mr Duterte’s war on drugs has claimed an uncounted number of victims
Investigations show many victims of Duterte’s war on drugs were his opponents, leftists, drug users (who needed treatment, not a bullet), and some dealers. The UN has implicated Duterte in more than 1,000 killings and disappearances of people. Police whistle blowers have told how they planted guns and drugs on these victims to frame them as involved in the drug trade. For more on these stats, please see the BBC’s June 30 article: The bloody legacy of Rodrigo Duterte.
2026 Postscript — The Export of Brutality
What happened in the Philippines did not stay in the Philippines.
The logic of Duterte’s drug war—label a group as dangerous, strip them of humanity, and justify state violence as “necessary”—has now echoed inside the United States. Under Trump’s renewed administration, immigration enforcement has taken on this same moral framing: not as policy, but as war.
ICE crackdowns have intensified under the language of “purification” and “restoring order,” and with that language comes permission—implicit and explicit—for violence. The reported killings of individuals like Good and Prieti during enforcement actions are not anomalies; they are signals. They show how quickly a system built on fear begins to treat human beings as expendable obstacles rather than citizens, migrants, or neighbors.
This is how the line moves: first criminals, then suspects, then categories of people.
Reason Magazine Border Patrol agents started the .
How Dictatorship Spreads (Philippines → U.S.) [2026]
Authoritarianism spreads less like an invasion and more like a contagion of ideas.
Duterte normalized extrajudicial killing under the justification of safety. That normalization did not need to be copied exactly—it only needed to be believed as effective. Once people accept that “some lives must be sacrificed for order,” the moral barrier collapses.
The United States, long seen as a stabilizing democratic force, adopting even fragments of this logic sends a powerful global signal: that brutality works, and that it is permissible.
If America reinforces this model rather than rejects it, it doesn’t just fall inward—it legitimizes authoritarian tactics outward. Other leaders no longer need to hide what they are doing. They can point and say: “Even the United States does this now.”
That is how the virus spreads.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Trump’s Mad Dash to Dictatorhood
Trump’s 4-year term is just as distributing. He knew COVID-19 did not bode well to be elected for a second term. So when the virus arrived in the United States, Trump went into deny, distort, and distract mode.
He continually played down how deadly the virus was and mocked people who wore masks. This turned a cheap, easy, commonsense public health approach of keeping people safe into a culture war.
Veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on Monday called the former President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic a “crime” that killed more than 1 million people.
The Hill reports Woodward said: “I call it a crime, not telling the people that he had been warned that — by his national security advisers in the most vivid way, which is outlined in these tapes, the interviews with them, where they are telling him.”
This is the reason why Woodward released the tapes he recorded with Trump early in 2020 as he interviewed him for his books Rageand Peril; earlier, he wrote Fear.
As of November 23, 2022, over 1 million US citizens have died of COVID; the vast majority of these deaths occurring while Trump held office before a vaccine was available. Trump crippled the CDC and turned public health guidance into a political weapon.
I haven’t even gotten into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. You can read all about this in my blogs When Do We Get To Use Violence? and Free to Choose.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: This is a real time snap shot of COVID cases in the world as of 12/1/2022, 1:20 PM | John Hopkins COVID Tracker
2026 Postscript — From Chaos to Structure
In 2022, Trump’s authoritarian tendencies were chaotic—impulsive, reactive, and often incompetently executed. By 2026, they have become more structured, more strategic, and more dangerous.
The attacks on institutions have matured into systemic pressure: the reshaping of federal agencies, the targeting of perceived internal enemies, and the expansion of executive power under the justification of national emergency and internal threat.
What was once denial, distortion, and distraction has evolved into something colder: normalization.
Where COVID exposed the cost of disinformation in lives lost, the current phase exposes something deeper—the willingness to institutionalize that disinformation as governing logic.
DOGE and It’s consequences: Image: The Spiggle Law Firm Government Efficiency (DOGE …
This image features a quote from Pete Hegseth during a congressional hearing regarding the war in Iran. Hegseth identified critics of the Iran war in Congress as a major adversary. He described their comments as “reckless, feckless and defeatist”. This testimony occurred during his first appearance before Congress concerning the conflict. Image from: Facebook Pete Hegseth told the H
How Dictatorship Spreads (U.S. Internal Evolution) [2026]
Authoritarian systems don’t arrive fully formed—they iterate.
The first phase is disbelief: “This can’t happen here.” The second is fatigue: “This is just how things are now.” The third is adaptation: people begin to adjust their behavior to survive within it.
By 2026, the danger is no longer just Trump as an individual, but the ecosystem that has learned from his first term. Loyalists are more prepared. Institutions are more compromised. Resistance is more fragmented.
And globally, this evolution matters.
When the United States moves from chaotic authoritarian flirtation to structured authoritarian governance, it becomes a model—not a warning. Countries on the edge of democratic backsliding now have a blueprint from one of the most powerful nations on Earth.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): There Is A Big Yang to Pay When Facts Fall Prey to AuthoritarianDisinformation Campaigns
Since we are on the topic of global pandemic, let’s take a look at President Xi Jinping. He has recently been elected to a historical third term. This of course is code for President for Life.
He has cozied up to Putin, imprisoned Chinese Wiegers, carried out a brutal crackdown on democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and most recently was posturing in a tense standoffs about the fate of Taiwan. Many think Taiwan could be the next Ukraine as XI Jinping lines up his ducks to make Taiwan China again.
But real life, especially nasty little viruses, don’t always go along with the next chapter of the Dictator’s Playbook. President Xi Jinping took a hardline approach to COVID when it first emerged in Wuhan, China.
Zero COVID policy worked at first and it became the main strategy of Xi. Local authorities eager to prove how loyal they are to Xi have implemented extreme lock down measures, including locking people inside their homes and whole apartment complexes.
Xi has bragged about how effective China’s Zero COVID policy has worked, while the rest of the world suffered. He didn’t put much effort into vaccination efforts other than insisting China make its own vaccine while claiming Western-made vaccine like Pfizer or Moderna would be ineffective.
“China would never do something crazy like use a COVID-19 vaccine made in the West! Heck, the Western World is falling apart… look at what happened at the US Capitol!“
Well, Xi is right about the US Capitol. We have lost our collective mind, but it is not because we have a free society and democracy (that is what he and his flying monkeys blameall the evil on).
The reason we are losing our collective mind is because our trust landscape is being destroyed by people who want to be just like him–a bully and a dictator—and digital clones, keep reading! But when you tell lies and spread disinformation to prop up your authoritarian ambitions, they tend to come back and bite you in the butt. And that is what is happening in China now.
CNN reported more than 17 protests occurring all over China, some very bloody. The deaths of people trapped inside their high rise apartment because the fire escapes had been locked due to Zero COVID lockdown measures ignited these protests but anger has been building all over China after 3 years of overzealous lockdowns. These measures are killing people too. Some have not been able to get medical care for heart attacks or other life threatening health conditions, others have committed suicide, all locked down have complained about getting rotten and substandard food or no food. This has lasted for months at a time.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: ‘Unbelievable scenes’ in China as protesters speak out against zero-Covid policy
Xi put himself into this very small box.
The protests are a real threat to his authority, but so too is China’s failure to create a vaccine that works. Virologists have compared China’s vaccine to Pfizer and Moderna and found it is not as effective.
Compounding the limited effect of China’s vaccine, China just has not put as much effort into vaccinating its population, relying instead on enforcing its Zero COVID policies with upmost brutalities. The result is the vast majority of China’s population are under vaccinated or not vaccinated. Nor do many individuals have immunity from a previous infection compared to the overall population.
If they let up on Zero COVID without vaccinating their population with a vaccine that works, COVID will roar through its population killing millions and while it does, it will be mutating and this could cause a BIG problem for the rest of the world, again.
If Xi relents and allows Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to be used in China, he reveals his lies about Western democracies to his people and he looks weak.
Oh what a sticky misinformation landscape Xi has created for himself!
2026 Postscript — Control Refined, Not Relaxed
China did not abandon control after the Zero COVID protests—it refined it.
Where brute lockdowns once sparked visible resistance, the state has shifted toward more sophisticated forms of digital surveillance, predictive policing, and narrative control. The lesson Xi Jinping learned was not that control fails, but that it must become less visible and more psychologically embedded.
The external posture has also hardened. Taiwan remains a focal point, and China continues to test the boundaries of how far authoritarian power can extend without triggering unified global resistance.
Digital Surveillance in 2026 Image: YouTube How Palantir Assists ICE | Interesting …
How Dictatorship Spreads (China’s Model) [2026]
China represents a different branch of the authoritarian evolution: not chaos, but precision.
Its model shows that a population can be managed not only through fear, but through dependency, convenience, and digital integration. This is authoritarianism that doesn’t always feel like oppression—it feels like infrastructure.
As Western democracies destabilize internally, China’s model gains appeal. It offers what struggling nations crave: order, predictability, and control.
If the United States falters, the ideological competition weakens. The world doesn’t just drift—it tilts.
Colosseum of Power explores how Billionaires are using their technology to buy elections and lull Americans into complacency (This graphic novel is available on Sapience’s Shop: The Quip Collection)
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): If Disinformation Doesn’t Work, Create A Scapegoat and Attack It
This is what Putin is doing now in Russia. He is losing the war in Ukraine. He looks weak and stupid. He needs a good distraction so his citizens don’t rise up against him and who knows, perhaps they castrate the man.
After all, it is his actions, and his actions alone, that have cut the Russian people off from the rest of the world–no Facebook, no Twitter, no vacations to Paris or Italy, no McDonalds–all because of his war with Ukraine.
So what does Putin do? Putin makes being gay illegal in Russia. He calls it a sickness of democracy and the Western World. He claims Russians don’t have gay people.
Come on Putin… now you look even more stupid than before. To read more about Putin and his flying monkeys, see Ukraine Letters.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Scapgoat from January 2021 blog
2026 Postscript — The Weaponization of Identity
Putin’s use of scapegoating has only intensified. As military outcomes fluctuate and internal pressures grow, the targeting of LGBTQ+ communities, dissidents, and “Western-influenced” citizens has expanded into a broader cultural purge.
This is not random cruelty—it is strategic cohesion. By defining an internal enemy, Putin reinforces loyalty among those who fear becoming the next target.
Can you name the ways Trump and company are scapegoating Americans?
2026 — AI Overview
Donald Trump and his allies have consistently utilized scapegoating as a political strategy to build power, focusing blame on immigrants, political rivals, the media, and specific officials to rally supporters. Key targets include immigrants, blaming them for crime and economic issues, and Democrats/critics like Hillary Clinton and Obama. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Key figures and groups targeted include:
Immigrants and Refugees: Portrayed as invaders causing economic instability and crime, often used to justify stricter policies.
Political Rivals & Government Officials: Including Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Democratic Congressional leaders, often branded as culprits for policy failures.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Used as a target for public frustration regarding COVID-19 recommendations.
The Media (“Fake News”): Labeled the “enemy of the people” to undermine negative reporting.
The “Deep State” & Federal Employees: Accused of sabotaging the administration.
International Bodies and Allies: China was used to push trade issues, while others have been blamed for perceived, 0.5.11 US weakness. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
The MAGA movement has also utilized broader targets like “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) to blame for various societal and institutional issues. [1]
Every authoritarian system eventually needs a scapegoat.
Fear alone is unstable. It must be anchored to a visible “other.” Once that “other” is defined, society reorganizes itself around avoidance, compliance, and silent agreement.
This tactic travels easily across borders because it adapts to local culture. In one country it is immigrants. In another, intellectuals. In another, religious or sexual minorities.
The specifics change. The mechanism does not.
And again—the United States plays a pivotal role.
If America normalizes scapegoating at scale, it accelerates this tactic globally. It tells every would-be strongman that division is not a liability—it is a governing strategy.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): The Dictator’s Playbook
Dictators around the world and throughout history use the same tactics. They attack the truth, exaggerate threats to make people afraid, and enflame emotions to herd as many people as possible under their make-believe umbrella constructed out of their annoying, droning chant: “I and I alone can fix it.”
That is the secret spell of a dictator. This stupid chant is his top-secret, classified magic potion. This is what every dictator throughout time has ever used to manipulate the masses. It is called ignorance dust. It is what evil fairies use to make their mischief.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: My drawing from April 2021 blog
What they don’t say out loud is …they broke it and they made up the boogeyman who you are now afraid of!
Dictators systematically claim they represent truth, decency, and dignity while fabricating facts, fiends, and fantasies about their own greatness.
Dictators pit people against each other, then they sit and watch the carnage on TV.
1. Expand your power base through nepotism and corruption.
2. Instigate a monopoly on the use of force to curb public protest.
3. Curry favour by providing public goods efficiently and generously.
4. Get rid of your political enemies.
5. Create and defeat a common enemy.
6. Accumulate power by manipulating the hearts and minds of your citizens.
7. Create an ideology to justify an exalted position.
You should read the article because Mark gives some very lively examples.
2026 Closing Reflection — The Global Stakes
What Maria Ressa warned about was never confined to one country.
Authoritarianism is not just a political system—it is a psychological condition that spreads through fear, repetition, and the erosion of shared reality. Each country that falls doesn’t stand alone; it becomes proof of concept for the next.
This is why the United States matters so deeply in this moment.
If it resists, it disrupts the pattern. If it falls, it accelerates it.
Because when one of the world’s most visible democracies begins to mirror the tactics of dictators it once condemned, the signal to the rest of the world is unmistakable:
The guardrails are gone.
And once that belief takes hold, the descent is no longer unthinkable—it becomes inevitable.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): So, Just How Do You Stand Up to a Dictator?
Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
This brings us back to Maria Ressa. She stood up to Rodrigo Duterte and to Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook nightmare. In an interview with Dave Davies on FreshAir she said:
I wasn't the only one under attack in Rappler. And Rappler is about a hundred people. We're - we just became - we hit 10 years. We're 10 years old January this year. So my gosh, we're going to be 11 by January next year. But it's 63% women. And our median age is 23 years old. So when our younger reporters came under attack, I became far more protective of our team.
And within a short period of time, we increased our security six times, seven times, because at some point it became very clear that online violence is real-world violence. And, you know, in your introduction, you talked about the attacks of President Duterte and Facebook. I think, by 2016, I was calling for an end to impunity, impunity of Rodrigo Duterte and this brutal drug war and impunity of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. They go hand in hand. One could not have happened without the other.
DAVIES: When you started Rappler, this news service, one of the things you note is that the population of the Philippines had already become remarkably attached to digital technology. Different from a lot of places in that way, wasn’t it?
RESSA: Yeah. Look, we were the texting capital of the world before this, the SMS capital of the world. And then we became known as the social media capital of the world. And by January 2021, for six years in a row, Filipinos spent the most time online and on social media globally. A hundred percent of Filipinos on the internet today are on Facebook. Facebook literally is our internet.
DAVIES : I mean, it seems that what you were discovering was that social media platforms, like Facebook, have discovered that people respond to sharply emotional messages. And so the algorithms give them more of that – anger, hatred, resentment – which, in turn, brings more engagement, which is what their economic model is based on. And it – you observed that this was allowing people who were telling lies that were destructive and poisonous to democracy to spread faster than truth.
The interesting thing is that you actually had conversations with Facebook executives about this, right? You met with a bunch of them. Did they get it? What did they say?
RESSA: Rappler was essentially an alpha partner of Facebook. We knew Facebook in the Philippines better than Facebook did. And I went to them with the data, hoping that they would give me more data and fix it. I thought it would be an easy fix 'cause in 2016, it was alarming to see this kind of, you know, incitement of hate. In 2017, I was one of about a dozen startup founders that Mark Zuckerberg met with. And, you know, I was trying to get him to come to the Philippines to see how powerful Facebook was. And at that point, 97% of Filipinos were there. And that's what I told him. I said, you know, you really have to come 'cause 97% of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook. So he started frowning. And I thought, OK, I must have been a little too pushy. And then, he looked at me. And he said, Maria, where are the other 3%?
DAVIES: (Laughter).
RESSA: I think that was the problem, right? They were so focused on market share, their profits, their goal for the business, that they forgot to look at the social harms. I also don't think it's a coincidence that they do not tell the difference between fact and fiction. It doesn't have any business or economic benefits to doing that. So at this point, you don't even have facts. So what did they do? They outsourced it. They gave - it became a fact-checking network that was doing this. But it was never integral to the product by design. Social media divides and radicalizes, and this is what we're seeing in the world today.
DAVIES: You write that, at one point, Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to start to really focus on weeding out offensive content. And you said, you’re missing the point. It’s – the problem isn’t content; it’s distribution. What did you mean?
RESSA: Because so much of the debate centers on content when that isn't the problem. Doesn't matter if your crazy neighbor talks about a conspiracy theory. You'll still like your crazy neighbor, and you listen. But it becomes different when that's the front page of your town newspaper. Imagine, the crazy things now make it to the front page. That is what goes viral. And that's the world we live in.Doesn't matter if it's real or not as long as it captures your attention. So it is your amygdala that decides, right? If you get angry, you'll share it.
And this is the - I mean, look, there is a - E.O. Wilson, who studied emergent behavior in ants, said that our greatest crisis that we face is our Paleolithic emotions, our medieval institutions, and our godlike technology. That godlike technology manipulated us to the point that the very systems of democracy that gave rise to this is now at the verge of failure.
DAVIES: You know, at the end of the book, you kind of ask the big question, which is, what do we do about this? I mean, now that you’ve – it’s apparent how harmful and poisonous this can be for democratic institutions. You know, in the United States, I mean, tens of millions of people believe made-up stories about a stolen election despite plenty of fact-checking that has been published debunking a lot of these stories. You think you have some strategies that might be effective? I mean, this is a little complicated, but share some of these ideas with us.
RESSA: In the short term, we decided, as we were walking into our presidential elections, that we would try to figure out what a whole-of-society approach to civic engagement could look like. And we created a four-layer, facts-first pyramid - four different layers. The bottom layer are 16 news organizations - the first time news groups worked together. You know, I've been trying since 2016, but we finally all work together. And that is the supply of fact checks.
But as you know, fact checks are really boring. They don't get wide distribution on social media. So that leads to the second layer. It's called the mesh - 115, 116 different civil society groups - NGOs, human rights organizations, climate change groups were there - business, the church. The Philippines is Asia's largest Roman Catholic nation. And the goal of the mesh layer is to share those boring fact checks, but to add emotion because emotion is what moves it through distribution. And what we found when we did that was that inspiration spreads as far as anger. The third layer are academic institutions. Eight of them total that took the data from the first two and every week told Filipinos how we were being manipulated, who was winning, who was losing, what were the media narratives being seeded? And then finally, the last layer, layer four, is rule of law. It's legal organizations from the left to the right in the Philippines, from the free legal group to the integrated bar of the Philippines to the Philippine Bar Association.
They filed, in less than three months, more than 21 cases, tactical and strategic, that helped protect the three layers. It worked. We were able to - it was the most successful attempt to try to take over the center of our information ecosystem. We mapped it. But more than that, within two weeks of launching this facts-first pyramid, the Philippine government - the office of the solicitor general filed a petition at the supreme court against Rappler and our commission on elections, because we were working with them at that point. They said that fact-checking is prior restraint. They tried to stop us from fact-checking. It almost made me laugh.
DAVIES: To kind of summarize here, it sounds like what you’re proposing is that news organizations need to overcome some of their competitive instincts and work together when there is important fact-checking to be done, connect them to other organizations in a way that puts energy and emotion into it and get that out there.
RESSA: Think about it like this. Like, if you don't have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections. And ultimately, what that means is that these elections will be swayed by information warfare. I mean, you know, it's funny. Americans actually look at the midterms. And they say, well, it wasn't as bad as it could be.Death by a thousand cuts - it's still bad. And if we follow, you know, what - the trend that we're seeing, if nothing significant changes in our information ecosystem, in the way we deliver the news, we will elect more illiberal leaders democratically in 2023, in 2024.
And what they do is they crumble institutions of democracy in their own countries, like you've seen in mine.But they do more than that. They ally together globally. And what they do is, at a certain point, the geopolitical power shift globally will change.Democracy will die. That point is 2024. We must figure out what civic engagement [looks like and], what we do as citizens today, to reclaim, [and] to make sure democracy survives.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Surveillance capitalism
In Maria Ressa’s interview on 1A, she explained surveillance capitalism and how it enabled want-a-be dictators like Duterte and Trump to actually get elected in Free and Fair elections. Something she told Jen would never have happened pre-Facebook (and other social media era).
Here is how she explains it:
technology has degraded facts and broken our societies. I became a journalist because I believe that information is power - it’s how we get justice. The death of democracy began when journalists lost our gatekeeping powers to the technology platforms that not only abdicated responsibility for protecting us ... but also destroyed democracy by destroying the facts ... for immense profit.
Like the age of industrialization, there’s a new economic model that brought new harms, a model Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism - when our atomized personal experiences are collected by machine learning, organized by artificial intelligence - extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will - a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences. This is happening to you - to all of us around the world.
Engagement based metrics of these American tech companies mean that the incentive structure of the algorithms, which is just their opinion in code implemented at a scale that we could never have imagined, is insidiously shaping our future by encouraging the worst of human behavior. Studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts.
Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these, we have no shared reality, no rule of law, no democracy.
In my upcoming book, the prologue I submitted last year began with the splintering of reality in Crimea in 2014. I had to revise that when Russia invaded Ukraine using the same narratives seeded then. Would that have happened if the platforms had acted 8 years ago? That is the true cost for the world.
Now these networks form a global nervous system of toxic sludge partly fueled by geopolitical power play. In 2018, we connected the information operations in the Philippines with Russian disinformation networks through websites in Canada. In 2020, Facebook took down information operations from China that were creating fake accounts for the US elections, polishing the image of the Marcoses, campaigning for Duterte’s daughter, and attacking me and Rappler. In 2021, the US and the EU called out China and Russia for Covid-19 disinformation.
We are all connected.
To read more on how to tackle this huge problem that the whole world faces, a psychological-social virus just as deadly as the Coronavirus, see her speech: The Assault on Freedom of Expression. It is jaw dropping.
No one can afford to sit on the sidelines and watch how this all plays out. Every human being alive right now has a choice to act or watch democracy fall. And if the choice is to watch, you will also watch the world fall over the Climate Cliff.
You (reading this right now)… you will be alive to watch this all happen. It is happening right now and it is going to happen faster than anyone has previously predicated.
If we don’t save democracies, we will never get around to collaboratinglike we have never collaborated before as a global species to solve the looming climate crises bearing down on all of us right now. These climate crises are going to push the entire human race over the Climate Cliff.
It is time to Wake Up!
And Ron DeSantis (another want-a-be dictator), go buy yourself a mask, fins, and snorkel because if Florida is where Woke Goes to Die…well, Florida ain’t going to be around after Earth’s glaciers melt… and it’s going to happen much faster than the Woke People you disparage are telling you it will happen!
What will you say to your children and grandchildren 50 years from now when there are no more democratic countries and we fail to act on Climate Change?
What will you tell them when you did not try to stop the Putins, the Xis, the Trumps (and his flying monkeys), and the rigid old men in Iran persecuting and killing their young people?
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Archetypal Animation for Ukraine Letters | March 2022
And old men of Iran, for what? What are you killing your young people for… a strand of hair sticking out from a veil?! Come on you stupid old men… what are you going to do? Kill every young person in your country? Yes, probably you will… the ouroboros is the symbol for rigid old men clinging to their dictatorships.
And the North Koreas…well, Kim Jong Un is sitting pretty these days not collaborating with anybody not even his fellow dictators and firing off his rockets… he is the ultimate symbol for a manly male, a tough pluck... a virile coward if I ever saw one. Someone has to enjoy all the spoils he directs only to him and his loyal supporters.
Maria Ressa says we are all living in the upside-down now. Yes, the very same weird world as depicted in Stranger Things. In this world, only the ruthless get to relax in luxury. Everyone else suffers unbelievable poverty, abuse, and gets crushed under super surveillance systems created by dictators afraid of losing power.
We may be wise enough to know that Facebook is tracking us using super surveillance systems and this is pretty bad… thisis where we are now. We all exist in a world of digital clones that are used against us to make huge profits for the ridiculously rich people of the world (think Elon Musk— you can be a corporate dictator too!). These are nasty little things corporations and social media platforms use to make more money by tearing truth, facts, and reality into tiny shreds. Read Maria’s book!
But the next step is not so very far away in our collective global future. The people fighting for their very lives in Ukraine RIGHT NOW know this! They know Putin will not stop if he wins Ukraine. No strongmen, no dictator, no authoritarian is ever satisfied with what they have. They always want more. That is their purpose in life. They have made themselves into monsters and the only thing they can do is devour the entire world. There are a lot of monsters alive RIGHT NOW trying to do this very thing.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: One of the images used in Feature Archetypal Animation from November 23, 2022 | The Monsters We Make
The next step Maria Ressa is very clear about is the fall of democracies around the world and the rise of dictatorships ruled by the ruthless. I believe her. And guess what? There is not much room at the top. What all ruthless rulers eventually do if they last long enough is turn on the very people who put them in power. Think about it. Ruthless rulers always need a foil,a ploy, an enemy, a scapegoat. Once they kill all the obvious people, they will start in on their loyal base of followers, the very people they put to sleep using their maniacal evil fairy dust:ignorance.
How to Stand Up to a Dictator: Archetypal Animation for When Do We Get to Use Violence | January 2022 blog
This is happening NOW on our watch!
How will you explain this to your children?
How will you explain food shortages, water shortages, raging floods and fires, sunken cities, more global pandemics, and governments that won’t even allow you to hold up a blank sheet of paper to protest not being able to protest for your most basic human needs and rights?
How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022): Feature Archetypal Animation
