Had an abusive mother? Then you understand the left's anti-Trump insanity



For a second time, someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. And for a second time, the media tried to convince us it never happened.

This is life in what I call our Cluster B society. And it’s getting worse every day.

Why did it seem like our politicians and cultural institutions had the same mental derangement that animates private domestic abuse?

But it’s nothing compared to what awaits us if we elect Kamala Harris president.

Coffee talk

What we know as “domestic abuse” has gone public and feral. More specifically, Cluster B personality disorder dynamics (extreme narcissism, manipulation, sociopathy, emotional instability) have taken over public discourse.

For the last couple of years, I've been discussing this on a weekly show I do with my friend Kevin Hurley, "Disaffected."

My mother first helped me understand our national dysfunction.

It was 2016. I was holding a spoon over my coffee at 8 p.m. in her kitchen. The spoon was a survivor from childhood, one of the original set we had with a trailing vine motif.

It had to be lowered to the counter very carefully. Lower it too fast, and it would make an audible "click" when it hit the counter. Lower it too clumsily, and it might fall and clatter as each end bounced up over the other.

It had to make no sound. Or my mother would scream.

I was 41 years old, terrified to let a spoon make an audible noise lest my mother turn her profane tirade on me. At the moment, it was aimed at her husband: the “retard,” the “brain-damaged a**hole” who “couldn’t do a godda**ed thing right.”

That moment turned my life. It was a cusp. I was 41, but I was also 7 years old, holding my breath and hunching my shoulders, hoping I’d be too small and quiet to notice.

Ka-chunk!

It wasn't exactly her kitchen. She lived there, but I owned the house. I bought it to rent to her so she could have a place to retire in impoverished old age. In just two years, my mother’s derangement had turned my days into a choice between becoming a Valium addict or washing enough of it down with my nightly vodka to make sure I didn’t wake up.

”This has to end. This has to end right now, or I’m going to die.”

I called my sister. What’s wrong with mother? What is happening to her? Why is she making up stories about things that never happened? Why is she lying to my face and accusing me of things I never did? Is it Alzheimer’s?

“Josh, she’s not going into dementia. I think our mother is a narcissist. I think she has a personality disorder,” my sister said.

I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on Cluster B personality disorders.

A remarkable thing happened. I was watching as a lifetime of “crazy” and “disconnected” maniacal behaviors slotted themselves neatly into categories. Like an industrial packaging machine, my memories were self-organizing into slots, into a taxonomy. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.

I found the key to understanding the kind of childhood that most people think only happens in low-budget, made-for-TV movies. My mother’s swings from elation to despair to rage. The lying. The claims that everyone from her brother-in-law to the grocery store manager had it in for her. The screaming in her children’s faces as she shook our shoulders and bellowed, “Why are you doing this to me?!”

Fast-forward to a time closer to today. When I discovered the source of my family’s derangement, I also discovered one of the sources of our current cultural crisis.

Cluster B nation

Cluster B. The emotional instability and self-victimization natural to borderline personality disorder, the grandiosity and insatiable vanity of narcissistic personality disorder — why did it seem like our politicians and cultural institutions have the same mental derangement that animates private domestic abuse?

Because they do. It started on the extreme left, the woke left, my former political and cultural home. But it has metastasized. It’s not just the “extreme left” that acts like an emotionally dysregulated autocrat any more. It’s the mainstream left.

It’s mainstream American culture. The White House. MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times (supply your own infinite series). It’s our teachers, our cultural leaders, our doctors, our universities.

We are living in a Cluster B world, and if we don’t wake up to that fact, it will be our undoing.

Gaslight this!

The mainstream media did its best in the hours right after the attempt on Trump’s life to make it "not real." It did it with plausible deniability. Headlines said things like, “Incident at golf course near Trump,” or similar constructions.

The media will allege and assert that it was merely being cautious and careful in the immediate aftermath because fog of war, etc.

This is not true. The media is deliberately working to disappear the fact that someone was trying to kill Trump again. The media wanted to make sure Americans did not have the normal emotional reaction to and investment in a presidential candidate being targeted for murder.

This is gaslighting, and it’s something I’m finding very difficult personally. You might even say it’s triggered me.

Like you, I find words like “gaslighting” and “triggered” tiresome. But I am using these terms in their true, real, and original sense. These phenomena exist; they are still real phenomena even though the words have been co-opted and abused by the left.

Look what you made me do

Only after the government and the FBI had to admit it was a second assassination attempt (oh, the irony) did the media come clean. But then it shifted tack and started blaming Trump himself for his own targeting.

This is evil. It’s what the word “evil” means. It’s pure Cluster B abuse. It is exactly parallel to the way abused children are blamed by their parents for causing their own abuse.

This was a constant feature of my childhood. My mother would blame me for “making” her lose her temper with me. I would not only be punished for my original infraction, but I would then be punished for “making her” get violent or abusive with me.

Yes, even as a child of less than 10 years old, I knew this was morally insane. I never did not know it. It infuriated me and made me despair. I prayed to God to make her stop and to give me justice.

Justice did not come. As happens to every child with abusive parents, when the home life became too dangerous to ignore, I was placed in kid jail. Children are institutionalized, put in juvenile hall, or put in corrective homes for wayward kids for the actions of their parents. Children are punished for the literal statutory crimes their parents commit against them.

Kamala dearest

Donald Trump is being so punished today.

And Kamala Harris, as we saw at the debate, is the current instrument of that punishment: a brazen, shameless liar who deliberately provoked him with the specific purpose of putting him on defense while he knew no one would check her.

That histrionic smirking, the hand poses with her chin on her fingers, the Hillary Clinton-esque derisive smiling headshake. It's disgusting.

If this country elects Kamala Harris, it will be electing a facsimile of my mother.

Man up?

Some men will accuse me of whining. They’ll interpret this as me saying that the only problem with the debate was that Kamala Harris was being mean to Donald Trump and that the purpose of my essay is to generate personal, little-boy sympathy for him.

I understand. These men are tired of the feminization of society, just as I am. They are tired of men being subordinate wimps to manipulative women. They are tired of seeing men pushed to “show their feelings” as if men have the same emotions as women. They are rightly tired of grown adults — but mainly other men — acting like little boys and failing to carry themselves as adult men.

I’m with them. We agree, though some of them incorrectly think that I disagree with them.

Because such men are so reactive against feminization, they go too far, and they start excusing actual substantive mistreatment by women of men. They focus only on the man’s reaction. Their only criticism is for a man being insufficiently stoic. All the time. In every situation. No matter how outnumbered he is. No matter how demonstrably rigged the legal system is.

This is going way too far. It’s going so far that such men are not actually acting like brothers in arms to men targeted this way; they are replicating the very same abuse dished out to these men.

The injustice of all of this is intolerable. No man today, no matter how ripped, how based, how stoic, how masculine, has the power to exist outside a feminized system that has made male-specific abuse and disempowerment legally and culturally enforceable.

If you’re one of those men I’m talking about, you’re not man enough either, no matter how highly you think of your abilities. You, too, are constrained to some degree within this system.

Unburdened by restraint

The point is that Kamala Harris is a dangerous psychopath. She gets away with it in large part because she is a woman. She benefits from the false perception that women cannot be as dangerous as men.

If she is elected, Harris is going to practice psychopathy on all of us. Not just Donald Trump.

I point out the narcissistic abuse so that you can see it and understand how it works and how dangerous its effects are.

I do not do it so that you’ll feel personal sympathy for Donald Trump. I do it so that you’ll understand what Kamala Harris is going to do to you, your family, your children, your legal system, the tax structure, and everything else she will be able to destroy if she is given more power.

Big Tech's AI shock troops came for us — are you next?



“I have terrible news, Josh. And I wanted you to know first,” said my friend and boss Jack Buckby on July 25.

Lancashire Hudson, the content creation agency he'd founded, had finally lost its battle with the bots.

There is no keeping your head down and working quietly as a conservative in media anymore. The left and its ever-more-powerful digital golem will find you and finish you.

Our cash-strapped clients had been increasingly turning to AI for the daily news, marketing, and other copy they needed for their ad-supported websites and newsletters. This writing wasn't nearly as effective, but it was far cheaper.

Overnight, Jack and I lost our jobs and our ability to pay our bills. Thirty talented, hard-working writers and editors in our company lost theirs, too.

The coming disruption

We often think of AI as a threat to manual labor or low-level service jobs, but the truth is it's got creatives like us squarely in its sights as well.

It's not as if we hadn't seen it coming. The immediate benefits of automating are all too clear, especially if a company is struggling. “AI is cheap, accessible, and easy," Jack tells me. "[Even if] it's not necessarily good."

That said, this quick fix could end up damaging the brand in the long run.

“it’s not the answer for businesses who want to maintain a good relationship with their audience and customers," says Jack.

"Ask yourself, when you pick up the phone to call a company and you’re greeted by a robot, how do you feel? If you were told that an article you read in a newspaper was generated by AI, would you feel compelled to read it still? No. The honest answer is 'no,' and if your audience and customers are humans, your content should be, too.”

It's this vision that kept Jack fighting — until the economic reality could no longer be denied.

A monster of their own making

While the whole media industry is feeling the pinch, companies out of step with dominant progressive views are particularly hard hit, many Lancashire Hudson clients among them.

“I’ve had clients’ websites completely destroyed by Google shutting off traffic from their news search engines for mildly criticizing the vaccine roll out. They didn’t post anything in opposition to the vaccine, but instead, opposition to the mandates — and it wasn’t even a view shared by most of the staff. It was a single op-ed. And the site was destroyed," says Jack.

This kind of Big Tech censorship is what finally did Lancashire Hudson in.

Jack has been through this before. If you’ve heard of him, it is probably because he was once the enfant terrible of the English far right.

As a young man from a working-class Northern English town, Jack fell in with an extreme crowd of angry, disaffected young men. They had reasons to be angry. What good-paying jobs were left had to be competed over with foreigners and “asylum seekers.” These young English men were told they were moral scum for being white, English, and blue collar.

That’s when Jack discovered the actual racism, anti-Semitism, and violence bubbling under the surface of his new “community.” As he grew up, he grew alarmed, and he pulled back into a more traditional conservative position.

This experience led him to a realization: It is the relentless social and economic punishment the left dishes out to conservatives and working people that is creating the “extremist far right” the left loves to hate. He tells the story in his book "Monster of Their Own Making."

Hiring the un-hirable

Jack built Lancashire Hudson specifically to offer work to people who have a hard time getting it.

His employees included Claire, a retired schoolteacher who lives in the Midwest and supplemented her small income with daily writing as she cares for her husband and disabled sister. And Denise, disabled and homebound but a quick and talented writer who can turn out perfect copy in 15 minutes. Her job with Jack was the first time in years that she made her own way instead of relying on benefits.

Jack has also reached out to those shut out from the job market for ideological reasons. Anton, for example, has a journalism degree but can’t find work in media because he’s been seen having conservative opinions in public. Patricia is a married mother with a new baby who relied on work at Lancashire Hudson after her English university pushed her out of a 10-year administrative role because she was not sufficiently woke-compliant.

Then there's me. At the end of 2022, I was pushed out of my 20-year career heading a consumer protection nonprofit when an internal coup branded me a racist, bigoted, misogynist transphobe for my personal, off-work political views. My job as editor with Lancashire Hudson kept me afloat.

The left's digital golem

In a way, losing these jobs is a second, indirect cancellation. There is no keeping your head down and working quietly as a conservative in media anymore. The left and its ever-more-powerful digital golem will find you and finish you. Take it from us.

We’re watching an entire industry eat itself alive. The problem is not only that humans are being pushed out of the field. If we think news is biased to the left now, how much worse will it get when we remember that AI models are being trained on the biased, leftist, partisan content that comes from traditional and legacy media?

As Jack puts it:

“When Google and Big Tech companies restrict visibility and traffic to businesses with which they do not agree, they destroy livelihoods. When they restrict advertising income, they say it’s OK to have one opinion but not OK to hold another. Ultimately, many businesses are being forced to make huge financial cuts just to stay alive, and in some instances, that means replacing workers with AI. The companies that toe the line might not have to. That’s not good for unifying the country, and it’s not good for our political discourse.”

We’re trying to retool and figure out a way to work again, but everyone is feeling blindly through this new world of increasing digital control and digitally created “content.”

I can’t tell you how to navigate this world because I’m learning as I go. But I hope you hear my warning: Your job, your career, is not safe, including all of you fellow “creatives." If you’re a conservative, your number is going to come up for cancellation quicker than others. Prepare yourself.

In the meantime, Jack and I are looking for those companies that want quality content produced, overseen, and quality-checked by real humans with real principles. All of us who care about excellence, truth, and accountability that works for a world of humans had better find each other soon.

How I stopped hating guns — and embraced self-reliance



This winter I turned on the light on the nightstand and stared at the 45-70 rifle propped up in the corner of my bedroom. After thinking for a moment, I got up and put it in the living room. This was the first time I had a gun under my own roof, and I couldn’t get to sleep knowing it was there. I’ve been prone to depression all my life, and it just seemed to be tempting fate. Mind, I’m not suicidal, but I gave myself one night to be a big baby about it.

The gun is on loan from my handyman and friend, Paul. “We’re gonna redneck you right up,” he'd grinned months earlier, while we we worked together to slop out and rebuild the flood-ravaged downstairs of my rental property, on a dirt road in rural Vermont.

Frankly, it was a small step to rethink guns after it became clear that the government recognized no natural or legal check on its actions.

The summer 2023 deluge couldn't have come at a worse time. I had bought the house in foreclosure years ago, originally to give family members an affordable place to stay. Now I was about to move in. I was in the process of selling my primary residence near Burlington, and I had to make this place habitable fast.

Burlington blight

Paul is right about needing to redneck me up. I’ve been a city boy my whole life, but the deranged progressive politics of urban New England drove me out. It started with the blue-haired set; an influx of lumbering 6'5" men tottering around in heels and eye shadow soon followed.

Then there was the crime, a relative novelty in our land of quaint bed-and-breakfasts and fall foliage tours. Burlington transformed into a miniature version of San Francisco, complete with boarded-up businesses shuttered by the lockdowns and covered in graffiti, human feces on the sidewalks, and hypodermic needles littering what used to be manicured lawns in nice neighborhoods.

When my curbside trash bins got “tagged” for the first time after living in the city for 15 years, that was the final straw. Now I’m learning about life with septic systems, well pumps, propane heating, backyard trash burning, and bears. Having a gun and knowing how to use it is just good sense when you live out here. In fact, I'd say it's good sense no matter where you live.

Confessions of a former gun-grabber

This is a recent development. See, I’m a former leftist. I drank the Kool-Aid of progressivism (and served a lot of it too) from the time I was a teenager. There wasn’t a welfare program I didn’t want expanded nor an “oppressed minority” I didn’t think needed special support from the state. My views were the typical politics of resentment. Like millions of other leftists, my orientation to the world was simple: “The government should take care of that for me."

Of course I wanted gun control. Everyone knows that guns kill people, right? It sounds stupid to me now, but as someone who spent his life exclusively around other leftists until the age of 41, I believed a lot of very stupid things for a very long time.

Most leftists won’t even listen to a conservative point of view. Or more accurately, perhaps, they can't. Confrontation with anything they perceive as “right-wing” provokes an almost involuntary emotional reaction, a kind of contamination-disgust reflex. I know it well because I often reacted the same way.

Until I didn't. A crisis that unmasked the mental and moral illness in my family was the first event that started to open my eyes to the real world. What I’d been taught at home — men are inherently dangerous and toxic, the government should regulate and tax everything so that single mothers can get bigger benefits checks — had disturbed my moral compass until middle age.

Cured by the CDC

And then came COVID. I had already begun to let go of my leftist beliefs and turn to the right, but nothing pushed me farther or faster than watching the government trample the constitutional rights of citizens. It was unbelievable how many people obeyed extra-legal orders to stay home, wear masks, take jabs, and tell on their families and neighbors who didn’t obey Big Sister (it’s definitely “sister” in the 21st century).

The extraordinary nationalization of rental properties by the Centers for Disease Control infuriated me. As a landlord, I could not believe that some “health”-based federal agency thought it had the right to tell my tenants they could just stop paying rent and that I had to suck it up. I count this turn of events as a blessing, as it cured me of the remnants of my allegiance to, well, communist views. Because that’s what leftism is today.

Back to guns. I can’t explain why I believed what I did. Over the years, more sensible people patiently explained to me that criminals don’t obey gun control laws. They pointed out that when you have bad guys with guns that good guys can’t get, you end up with bad guys in charge and good guys in coffins. This is so glaringly obvious that a 4-year-old could understand it, and yet I didn’t. Never underestimate the average leftist's capacity for self-delusion.

Actually, I can explain why I believed what I did and why millions of leftists believe the same. No actual thinking is taking place, only feeling. I had emotions about guns, but no thoughts. To be a leftist is to be ruled by fear, disgust, and the projection of one’s own negative motivations onto other people.

Taking responsibility

I can’t live that way any more. Not after the real world slapped me in the face — and slapped some sense into me. Being a small business owner educated me about the plain thievery of our taxation system. Being excommunicated from my job, my friends, and my social circle over my refusal to take a dangerous vaccine — and worse, my persistence in talking about it loudly and publicly — taught me the difference between friends and “friends.”

Frankly, it was a small step to rethink guns after it became clear that the government recognized no natural or legal check on its actions. We’re all responsible for defending and protecting our lives, our property, and our families.

So this summer Paul is going to train me more on the rifle. I fired it a few times at a target in the back yard (an old microwave oven, and yes, the explosion was as satisfying as you think), but now it’s time to get proficient. I’ll learn how to operate, store, and carry guns safely and sensibly. If a bear or — God forbid — an intruder threatens my safety, I’m my own line of defense, as it should be.

After that first night of putting the rifle outside my bedroom, I put it right back. It’s not good coddling yourself; confronting reality is the cure for fear. Ever since, I’ve slept like a baby.