Meta to pay $17 billion over social media harms — but who's really responsible?



Meta is set to pay a staggering $17 billion settlement after allegations that its social media platforms contributed to addiction and other harms among young users.

The agreement marks one of the largest corporate payouts tied to the growing backlash against Big Tech — and BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan "Lomez" Keeperman aren’t exactly sure how to feel about it.

“So we had a ruling this week,” Rufo says, “a settlement this week that Meta, which is the kind of dumb rebrand, like, middle-aged man identity crisis rebranding of Facebook, has settled to pay $17 billion.”

“Meta has been found guilty, or admitted to, harming children with its Facebook technology,” he explains.


“Essentially, they’re saying social media is addictive and harmful to kids in the same way that kids might be, you know, lighting up cigarettes,” he adds, before asking Lomez whether it’s good or bad.

“I’m of like two, three, four minds about this, honestly. On the one hand, it does strike me a little bit as a moral panic, I should say, which is like, OK, we’re going down this path of increased social media use. People are addicted to their phones,” Lomez says.

“There’s no ambiguity around that. That’s obvious and demonstrably the case. The question is, what harms are these doing? ... And I think there are real harms,” he adds.

One of these “harms” is the “pervasive mass psychosis” that Lomez explains is “dominating our public life in almost every respect.”

“People getting herded into these sort of algorithmic valleys, you might call them, where they don’t see outside of it. Their information environment is completely one-sided, and this is deranging to people,” he says.

However, is the responsibility on those who have created social media, or those who use it?

“I think it’s a little bit of both,” he says. “And certainly when it comes to kids, I think kids are particularly susceptible to this stuff. And there ought to be a certain kind of responsibility that’s placed on the people creating these tools to be mindful of the ways in which kids in particular are susceptible, are able to be manipulated, where their sort of weaknesses are.”

“So this is all to say, when it comes to Meta here, is it reasonable for them to pay out $17 billion to these states? My answer is actually, yeah, it is,” he adds.

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The $1 trillion social media addiction trial has begun — is the disorder real?



Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram are addictive! At least that’s what four states proclaimed in a monster lawsuit that accuses Meta of fostering unsafe platforms for young users’ mental health and well-being.

Together, the states seek $1.4 trillion in damages — nearly enough to bankrupt the entire company, while lawmakers get even more fuel to ram down restrictive age verification laws on Americans.

The company faces an uphill battle.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. As the trial now gets underway, all eyes are on two simple questions.

Is social media addiction medically real? And does that matter in court?

The lawsuit

In early July, Meta revealed that four blue states banded together to stick it to the company and its two top social media platforms. California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey filed a joint lawsuit that claims Facebook and Instagram are addictive, especially to minors, and that Meta misled the public on the danger both apps posed to users’ mental health.

Meta was quick to refute the claim, stating that "social media addiction” isn’t a real mental health condition recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, or any other medical organization. The company also denied that it misled the public.

These counterclaims fly in opposition to the historic loss Meta faced in a similar lawsuit against a 20-year-old woman who convinced a jury that she became addicted to social media as a minor. It’s important to note, however, that several other companies were also implicated in that lawsuit, including Snapchat and TikTok (both of which settled) and YouTube (which was also forced to pay damages alongside Meta).

Nevertheless, the plaintiff states want the court to impose sweeping changes to how social media works altogether, scrapping so-called "infinite" scroll, video autoplay, the hugely popular evanescent content that's often the standard format for short video posts, and even ubiquitous features like filters that alter your facial appearance or content feeds determined largely by algorithm.

Is social media addiction a real problem?

Even if there is no clinical definition for social media addiction, that doesn’t mean these platforms aren’t harmful. But are they actually addictive? It depends on who you ask.

An addiction is defined as “a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence.”

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Some experts claim that an addiction to activities — such as social media, video games, and smartphones in general — illicit a dopamine response in the brain that, if overused, can lead to dopamine deficiency — a complete crash of the brain’s reward system. At this stage, a user may experience irritability, depression, and anxiety. These feelings of withdrawal cause them to re-engage in the addictive activity to regain a sense of pleasure, only to find that the reward mechanism isn’t as effective, which leads to even more of the behavior as they chase the original thrill.

Others claim that the dopamine deficiency theory is pseudoscience at best. Real addiction is much more complex. Unlike activities that provide hits of dopamine, addictive chemicals, like drugs and alcohol, force the dopamine system to run wide open without end, giving the user an insatiable urge for more that can only be fueled by ingesting larger quantities of the initial drug.

Dopamine is involved in both cases. However, it takes an artificial stimulus — like a drug or chemical — to actually turn a dopamine rush into an addiction. Anything else is merely a bad habit that can be reversed or broken.

The real danger of social media

Whether you believe that social media addiction is a legitimate condition or a total farce, the ramifications of cases like the one Meta faces today could have widespread consequences for the American people.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle are actively trying to take away our rights to freely access smart devices, AI chatbots, and websites without some form of digital ID. One defining factor in this war against a private and anonymous internet hinges on underage users. Some lawmakers believe that we need protections in place to limit or outright ban social media access for minors. A victory against Meta would only be positioned as further “proof” that social media harms underage users and that more legislation is the only solution.

Given how badly the last case like this went for Meta, the company faces an uphill battle. If found guilty, it could pay up to $1.4 trillion in damages, or approximately 85% of its entire value listed on the NASDAQ.

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Do Joe Rogan and Theo Von care if their audiences go broke?



America's gambling problem has a new face, and it looks suspiciously like yours. Or your brother's. Or the guy next to you at Mass who keeps checking his phone during the homily.

A recent Ohio State University study found that religious affiliation does almost nothing to prevent sports betting. Catholic men ranked among the most enthusiastic gamblers in the dataset. The pew and the parlay, apparently, get along fine.

It trains people to seek deliverance through randomness rather than work, discipline, family, or faith.

Americans love believing that gambling addiction belongs to someone else: the degenerate, the Vegas burnout, the man at the racetrack, clutching losing tickets and emitting fumes that could strip paint.

Bottoming out

That stereotype has expired. Online gambling has democratized self-destruction, and the business of bottoming out is booming.

Personal responsibility matters — nobody disputes this. No app physically forces a man to wager his rent on a Tuesday game between two NBA teams he has never watched or followed and whose rosters he couldn’t name under torture. Adults make choices, and adults must own those choices. But treating this purely as a failure of weak individuals overlooks the scope of the problem.

America built a digital temptation machine that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. Old-school gambling required some effort. You drove somewhere. You walked through doors. You made bets in person. It also carried a healthy stigma: Someone might spot you. Shame had room to operate.

Online gambling vaporized that friction. The casino now follows you to the kitchen, the office bathroom, your daughter's soccer game, and, yes, occasionally a funeral reception.

Value play

The trick of online gambling is that it markets itself as entertainment and finance at the same time. You’re not gambling. No, you are "making picks." "Building parlays." "Finding value." The jargon sounds vaguely like a hedge fund internship for guys in tank tops.

The apps borrow heavily from social media design. Bright colors. Instant dopamine. Notifications calibrated to land at psychologically vulnerable hours. Near-misses engineered to keep users emotionally hostage. Vegas relied on free drinks and flashing lights. Modern sportsbooks use behavioral science perfected by Silicon Valley.

Sports betting hits young men particularly hard because it bonds with masculine identity. Sports have always offered escape, but now they double as a cruel promise of freedom from economic anxiety.

Every game now functions as a financial event. A chance to win. A chance to recover. A chance to prove you outsmarted the algorithm. I say this as someone who enjoys the odd wager, maybe 20 bucks on a soccer match or a UFC fight every few months. Plenty of my friends go harder. A few are clearly addicted, though they would never admit it.

RELATED: Predatory gambling apps are using loopholes to avoid state laws

Gabby Jones/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Undue influence

This is not a male-only problem. Women participate too, in growing numbers. The image of gambling addiction as a strictly male affliction belongs to the era of landlines, fax machines, and Blockbuster late fees. Apps market aggressively to everyone, repackaging an old vice as lifestyle entertainment.

Casual. Social. Empowering. America took compulsive wagering and gave it influencer branding. Lives ruined, families wrecked, mounting debt across every demographic. Yet the celebrity endorsements roll on without a hint of hesitation.

Joe Rogan and Theo Von have both taken DraftKings sponsorships.

Neither man invented gambling. Neither forces a listener to do anything. Both have every right to accept advertisers.

But there’s an important question worth asking. At what point does cultural influence carry moral weight? Both men are multimillionaires. Neither needs the sponsorship money to keep the studio lights on. With tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of dedicated listeners, they could sell practically anything. Sneakers, protein powder, trucks, premium tequila, leather wallets thick enough to stop a bullet, ergonomic office chairs, mattresses that promise spinal enlightenment. The list is endless.

But they choose gambling, which is reckless given that many of their listeners are young men who treat an ad read by either of them as an endorsement, a recommendation from a trusted voice, practically a green light from an older brother who has supposedly figured life out. Von, in particular, should know better. He has spoken honestly about his battles with addiction, and yet here he is, reading copy for an industry built on the same psychological hooks.

Gaming addiction

A ruthless and exploitative industry, I might add. The online gambling giants don’t build empires on casual users dropping five dollars on the Super Bowl. Profits come disproportionately from heavy users chasing losses at 2 a.m. while insisting they are "due." America has normalized this sickness into something that no longer registers as strange. Ads run during games, before games, after games, across social media, and occasionally during segments warning about gambling addiction itself. "Call this hotline if you have lost your house. Also, use code TOUCHDOWN for a risk-free bet."

The damage runs deeper than money. Online gambling sells the fantasy that rescue is one lucky bet away. One hit. One miracle payout. It trains people to seek deliverance through randomness rather than work, discipline, family, or faith.

The isolation makes it uniquely dangerous. Alcoholics gather in bars. Drug users move through visible circles. The online gambler hemorrhages money for years beside a sleeping spouse who trusts that everything is under control. Across the country, an increasing number are rolling the virtual dice, each one believing he is the exception.

He is not. The house always wins, and these days the house fits in your back pocket.

The night of the gun was never-ending — until the day I surrendered to Christ



I remember the night my legs gave out.

I woke up to my sister standing in my doorway. She was scared. Our parents were arguing behind a closed bedroom door, voices raised, something different in the tone this time. We walked down the hallway together and knocked.

Through recovery and faith, I encountered Jesus not as religion but as relationship.

When the door opened, my father was standing there with a loaded gun pressed to his head.

My legs went numb. I collapsed onto the floor.

Long night's journey

It wasn’t an isolated moment.

Our home was marked by ongoing conflict and instability, the kind that teaches you early how to stay alert, how to read a room, and how to survive without ever really feeling safe.

I didn’t have words for what I had just seen. I only knew something wasn’t right in a way I couldn’t fix and that whatever I thought “normal” was, it wasn’t this.

That kind of moment doesn’t always explode your life right away. Sometimes it just sits there, quiet and unprocessed, and follows you.

It followed me. It bled into my personal and romantic relationships and ultimately skewed my view of the world and of myself. I learned to survive rather than connect — to perform rather than belong. I struggled to understand friendship, trust, and emotional safety. And over time, resentment toward my parents, especially my father, became part of my identity.

Seeking 'normal'

As I got older, that disconnect showed up everywhere. I didn’t feel like I fit in. I struggled to form real friendships. I was made fun of just for being myself, and after a while, you start to believe there’s something wrong with you. I didn’t know what the problem was. I just knew I felt it.

So when drugs and alcohol showed up, they didn’t feel like destruction. They felt like a solution. They quieted something I couldn’t explain. They made me feel normal, or at least closer to the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be.

That’s the trap, because it works — at first. What I didn’t understand was that I wasn’t fixing anything. I was covering something I didn’t want to look at.

Later, when things got worse, it was labeled a "mental health" issue.

My father struggled with mental illness, and for many years I wrestled with my own diagnoses, some of which, in hindsight, did not fully capture what was truly happening beneath the surface.

I was prescribed medical marijuana. But instead of helping, it began triggering severe adverse reactions, including escalating instability, mania, and psychosis that distorted my judgment and sense of reality.

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Not broken

Looking back now, I don’t believe there was something fundamentally broken in me. I believe there was something unaddressed. There’s a difference.

I kept looking for something to fix the symptoms, but nothing was touching the root. And that only works for so long.

Eventually, everything catches up. It did for me.

Addiction did not destroy my life overnight. It unfolded through cycles of defiance, denial, and relapse. Each time I tried to regain control on my own terms, I fell deeper into chaos.

It culminated in a destructive spiral that led me to a reckless and disorienting bender in Atlantic City. The consequences I now faced were legal. There was no talking my way out of this or pretending it didn't exist. I had reached a point where I could no longer outrun the reality of what my life had become.

Brought to my knees

In hindsight, I believe God had to bring me to my knees.

The illusion of control was gone. I finally realized there was no way I was getting out of this under my own power. And that's when change finally became possible.

It became possible because faith became real — not something I grew up around, not something I understood intellectually, but something lived.

Scripture says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” And also, “You shall be called by a new name.”

I used to hear that and think it sounded nice. Now I understand it.

Redeemed and reconciled

Because my identity did change — not overnight, not perfectly, but fundamentally. I was no longer defined by what I had been through or how I had responded to it. Through recovery and faith, I encountered Jesus not as religion but as relationship. Through prayer, God revealed to me that I was not meant to be ashamed of my past but to embrace it, bring it into the light, and allow it to help others.

One of the most profound outcomes has been reconciliation with my father. The man I once viewed as the source of my wounds became part of a redemption story marked by grace, forgiveness, and healing.

Today, I live a life that is sober and grounded in faith. I’ve worked the Twelve Steps and now help guide others through the process. I am actively involved with Chain Breakers and bringing Christ-centered recovery to those who need it.

If there is one message I hope to share, it is that unhealed childhood trauma, misunderstood mental health struggles, and substance abuse are deeply interconnected. Healing requires both spiritual surrender and honest conversations about mental health.

I share this with humility, knowing I too remain a work in progress. It's my hope that the more we bring stories like mine into the light, the less power shame and isolation will have over those who are still struggling.

Exclusive: Trump administration claims another scalp in war on fraud — this time, a Texas pill-pusher



Scores of individuals were indicted during the first Trump administration for their involvement in a network of "pill mill" clinics — operations that diverted millions of oxycodone, hydrocodone, and carisoprodol pills with the help of health care professionals evidently eager to endanger public health to make a quick buck.

The current administration, which has significantly ramped up its fraud crackdown, has delivered one of the participants in this scheme to justice.

The Justice Department revealed in an exclusive to Blaze News on Monday that three days earlier, a federal jury in the Southern District of Texas convicted Barbara Marino — a 65-year-old resident of Tomball who served as the sole prescribing physician at Angels Clinica in Houston — of one count of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance and four counts of distributing a controlled substance.

Marino faces more than 20 years in prison for each of the five counts.

"Medical physicians who exploit their prescribing authority for profit over patient care break an inherent trust with their patients, and we will hold them accountable," said Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the DOJ's National Fraud Enforcement Division in a statement. "The Department of Justice remains committed to protecting the public from dangerous and unlawful distribution of controlled substances, especially when the drug dealer is a doctor."

Marino, who was first licensed to practice medicine in the Lone Star State in 1990, was found to have unlawfully distributed over 1 million pills of opioids and other controlled substances through the strip-mall clinic in Houston where her practice was based.

Angels Clinica in Houston has since permanently closed. Angels Medical, which is linked to the now-defunct Houston clinic, did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

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The original indictment against Marino said that of the roughly 1.06 million controlled-substance pills for which she issued prescriptions between September 2018 and August 2019, 518,000 were hydrocodone pills, 65,000 were oxycodone pills, and approximately 416,000 were carisoprodol pills.

Many of the purported patients who obtained prescriptions from Marino's cash-only clinic were effectively drug mules sent her way by traffickers who subsequently peddled the drugs on the street, according to court documents and evidence presented at trial.

This grift proved lucrative.

The Justice Department claimed that Marino — who is supposedly an addiction specialist — received over $400,000 from Angels Clinica's owners both for writing prescriptions that lacked a legitimate medical purpose and for doing so outside the usual course of professional practice.

Evidence shown at trial suggested that Marino rarely if ever encountered a patient for whom she wouldn't prescribe dangerous and addictive drugs.

In one instance, she reportedly prescribed what the DOJ characterized as a "dangerous cocktail of hydrocodone and carisoprodol" — apparently one ingredient short of the so-called "Houston Cocktail" — to a pregnant woman in her third trimester. The woman's OB-GYN testified that the drugs had threatened the well-being of both the mother and her unborn child.

The DOJ highlighted another case exemplifying Marino's willingness to give practically anyone hard drugs, specifically a mentally compromised patient — a diagnosed bipolar schizophrenic who suffered from the chronic delusion that he was President Richard Nixon — to whom she allegedly prescribed her dangerous cocktail on at least three occasions.

Drug Enforcement Administration Assistant Administrator Cheri Oz, whose agency investigated this case, stated, "Patients put their trust and their lives into the hands of our medical and health care professionals.

"The highly addictive, dangerous misused drugs in this case — oxycodone and hydrocodone — are meant to treat pain, not cause it," continued Oz. "DEA remains relentless in our pursuit of those who poison our communities and exploit our health care system, all to line their own pockets with the profit from others' pain."

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With Louisiana Homeless Bill, Democrats Once Again Smear Sensible Policy As ‘Jim Crow’

Lawmakers in Louisiana are weighing new policies that align with the vision for addressing America’s homelessness crisis outlined by President Donald Trump last summer. This approach breaks with a misguided, decades-old national practice of offering homeless people publicly funded support without also asking them to help themselves. In response, outraged activists have compared Louisiana’s proposals […]

Why your coffee addiction is a superpower



I've never felt much sympathy for addicts.

Not the gamblers refreshing their portfolios at 2 a.m., nor the wine devotees who have rebranded a nightly bottle as “self-care,” nor the doomscrollers mainlining outrage as if it were a dietary need.

For decades, coffee attracted suspicion like a stranger at a school gate.

Addiction, to me, has always looked less like an illness and more like a failure of will. Which makes this confession awkward.

Mr. Coffee

I am, demonstrably, an addict — a coffee addict, to be specific. Three cups daily, minimum. Four when my sleep quality files for early retirement. I have never pawned jewelry, put my family through an intervention, or woken up in a city I have no memory of arriving in. But remove coffee from my routine, and my tolerance for other people's existence, already a carefully managed resource, drops to levels more commonly associated with Patrick Bateman. If you have never related to that sentence, congratulations on your even temperament and your decaf. But bear in mind that you're also, statistically, in the minority.

In America, the world's most instructive laboratory for excess, coffee consumption has hit historic highs. Entire office towers function because of it. So do emergency rooms. It powers long-haul truckers and early-morning construction workers. Coffee, for tens of millions of Americans, is less a habit than a non-negotiable term of existence.

And unlike most dependencies, this one keeps passing its medical exams with flying colors.

Fill 'er up

A new, long-term study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, tracking over 400,000 people, arrived at a finding that seems almost conspiratorially convenient for people like me: two to three cups a day correlates with measurably lower rates of anxiety and depression. The effect doesn't erase your suffering or rewrite your difficult childhood. The risk simply drops, noticeably and consistently.

The mechanism is straightforward. Caffeine blocks adenosine, the chemical your brain uses to announce that it is done for the day. Dopamine rises to fill the gap. Concentration improves. The effect feels dramatic because at the neurochemical level, something genuinely dramatic has happened. This is not a trick the mind plays on itself, but chemistry doing exactly what chemistry does.

For decades, coffee attracted suspicion like a stranger at a school gate. Too stimulating. Too addictive. A gateway to jittery dysfunction. The warnings came confidently and often. Then the studies accumulated, the data became less impeachable, and coffee was acquitted of most charges.

Beyond the bean

Caveats exist, as they always do. Five cups daily and the benefits plateau, then reverse. The same compound that steadies you begins rattling the cage. To be fair, anyone drinking five cups of coffee a day has larger questions to answer about his life choices, and caffeine is probably the least of his concerns.

The bean, at least, has always been transparent about the transaction. You know exactly what you are getting and exactly what it costs.

What has been done to the bean is another matter entirely.

Somewhere between the postwar diner and the present moment, coffee got kidnapped. Starbucks, once a straightforward purveyor of decent espresso, became a laboratory specializing in whipped, drizzled, and syrup-fortified structures that happen to contain trace amounts of coffee. Syrups compounding upon syrups. Whipped cream deployed where no cream has any reasonable business. Names so elaborate they require careful study and occasionally a second opinion.

At some point, ordering coffee became something you perform rather than something you do.

The prices reflect the absurdity: six or seven dollars for something containing more sugar than a child's birthday cake, sharing only a nodding acquaintance with the actual coffee bean.

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Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Teddy's choice

The backlash arrived. Starbucks has watched American foot traffic fall as customers stopped finding the ritual worth the receipt. Black coffee is gaining ground. Strong, simple, unbothered by the season, it is coffee that commits to tasting like coffee.

There's something satisfying in that correction. Not moral superiority — nobody earns virtue by ordering an Americano — but a return to proportion. The unnecessary removed, the thing itself restored. Real coffee demands nothing from you. No rehearsed order, no twelve-step customization, no theatrical pause before naming your flavor preferences. Hot water meets ground bean; the transaction is completed. The fog between you and the day lifts on schedule.

And so I have made my peace with the label. Addict, junkie, dependent — the word changes nothing about what is in the cup. There are considerably worse things to crave. Voltaire drank dozens of cups a day. Beethoven counted out exactly 60 beans every morning. Theodore Roosevelt consumed a gallon before most men had finished breakfast. All three left the world considerably more interesting than they found it. Correlation may not be causation, but it is a remarkably consistent pattern among people who got things done.

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The new activism looks a lot like mental illness



Anti-ICE rebels aren’t simply “protesters.” Protest is public dissent: signs, slogans, marches, chants, petitions. It aims to persuade. It does not ram police with cars, swing fists at agents, loot businesses, or try to provoke violence.

When anti-ICE activists get detained or arrested, many shout “First Amendment” as if those two words erase everything that happened before the cuffs went on. The First Amendment protects speech, publication, and peaceful assembly. It does not give anyone a license to threaten people, incite lawless action, commit assault, trespass, vandalize property, or participate in criminal conspiracy and intimidation.

Clinical language can clarify motives, but it should not excuse crimes.

That distinction matters because many of today’s mobs don’t merely “speak.” They physically interfere with law enforcement. They obstruct operations. They harass officers and targets. They try to create fear.

We used to teach children to respect the rule of law and the people tasked with enforcing it. Today, many activists treat authority as the enemy by definition, and they feel entitled — sometimes obligated — to attack it.

Not every person in a crowd acts from the same motive. Still, the behavior patterns repeat often enough that clinical language can help explain what we’re seeing. I have divided these anti-ICE “rebels” into seven categories — not as formal diagnoses for individuals I have not examined, but as recurring profiles that show up in chaotic group behavior.

Trump derangement syndrome

Some rebels treat ICE as an extension of President Trump and react accordingly. In my view, this presents as an irrational, disproportionate fixation that can resemble “quasi-psychotic” hostility toward anything associated with Trump — spilling over to people and institutions that have little to do with him, including federal agents doing their jobs.

Celebrity worship syndrome

Some activists take cues from entertainers and influencers and translate slogans into action. This is an obsessive-addictive disorder more than mere fandom. Celebrity messaging can nudge fans from passive agreement to performative activism, especially when the cultural reward system prizes outrage. Public denunciations from stars can energize followers who want to prove loyalty through escalating conduct.

Mad hatters

Some participants display the impulsivity, defiance, and hostility toward authority that clinicians associate with oppositional-defiant disorder or conduct disorder. In its more destructive form, the behavior resembles conduct-disorder traits: aggression, property destruction, and contempt for basic social rules.

Lost souls

Some people arrive lonely, purposeless, or adrift. A mob offers identity, belonging, and a mission. The cause becomes a substitute for meaning, and the group’s adrenaline becomes a substitute for inner stability.

Regressed rioters

Some adults regress under stress and excitement into adolescent defiance — or younger. Think “terrible twos.” They seek confrontation, throw verbal tantrums, and act on impulse, not reason. They perform outrage as if outrage itself justifies whatever follows.

Mr. and Mrs. Personality

Certain personality disorders show up frequently in chaotic movements: paranoia, grandiosity, emotional volatility, hostility, and disregard for others’ rights. These traits can thrive in crowds because the crowd rewards extremity and dilutes individual accountability.

Substance abusers

Alcohol and drugs lower inhibition and increase risk-taking. For some, a riot becomes a party with a political soundtrack — an excuse to seek thrills while claiming a moral cause.

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These categories help explain how a crowd can form so quickly, swing into panic, and turn predatory. People mirror each other. They feed on fear and moral fervor. They swarm, then strike.

Clinical language can clarify motives, but it should not excuse crimes. Anyone who assaults officers, obstructs enforcement, destroys property, or threatens people should face arrest, prosecution, and due process. Speech receives protection; violence does not.

ICE agents enforce federal law. They face danger, hostility, and organized intimidation. A society that treats mob coercion as “protest” abandons the rule of law — and endangers everyone.