You turn on the news, and it happens again, the small interior lurch, the sense of a floor that will not quite hold still beneath you. The President says something that would have ended any other presidency before lunch, and the people arranged behind him compose their faces into reverence, and somewhere in the gap between what you are seeing and how the room is choosing to react, a thin wire in your skull pulls taut. You have learned the name for this sensation. You live, by your own honest accounting, in a constant state of it. You are being mindfucked, daily, on a schedule, and the first thing worth saying, before all the rest, is that you are not the one who is broken.
Begin with the arithmetic, because the sheer volume is the tell. In a single recent week, a major network sat down, tallied the President’s false public statements, and arrived at twenty-eight. Not twenty-eight shadings or generous spins. Twenty-eight discrete, checkable, flatly untrue assertions, about inflation and gasoline and elections and the border, including the marvelous claim that the United States enjoys total control of a strait that Iran was, at that very moment, refusing to let anyone cross. Twenty-eight lies in seven days is not the conduct of a man who occasionally misremembers. It is a deployment. You cannot fact-check a firehose, and the design intends that you cannot. By the time you have braced yourself against one falsehood, three more have already surged through the hose, and the depletion you feel afterward is not an unfortunate side effect of the method. The depletion is the method.
Then there is the absurdity, which performs a separate job. He dozed off, again, while the official he installed to oversee the nation’s health lectured an audience on the alarming decline of teenage sperm. He called the White House, the actual house, a shithouse. He mused aloud about annexing Venezuela as a fifty-first state, weeks after having its leader seized. He stood beside a college football coach, appeared to look more or less directly at the man, and could not summon his name. He introduced his defense secretary with the admiring observation that he was central casting, a fellow who, the President added warmly, loves war. None of this qualifies as a gaffe in the old and forgivable sense, the stumble of a tired man at a long lectern. It is the steady dissolution of the boundary between the governance of a republic and the improvisations of a basic-cable heavy, and every fresh absurdity arrives with the same quiet demand stapled to it. Ratify this, or be filed under hater.
Here is the part engineered specifically for you, aimed past the cameras at the soft tissue of your certainty. Watch the cabinet. Watch the courtiers metabolize the unspeakable into the unremarkable, nodding along, applauding on cue, competing to praise the eloquence of the emperor’s nudity. Their performance is not for him, because he requires no convincing. The performance is for you, because gaslighting conducted at the scale of a state requires a chorus, and the entire function of the chorus is to render your alarm at the malfunction in the room. If every adult present treats the deranged as ordinary, then the deranged quietly becomes the ordinary, and your refusal to clap becomes the symptom that needs explaining. This is the oldest device in the authoritarian manual, older even than the big lie. Surround the witness with enough composed collaborators that she begins, against the plain evidence of her senses, to distrust her own eyes.
So let us be clinical about what is being done to you, since clarity is precisely the faculty they are working to confiscate. The purpose of the firehose was never to make you believe any particular claim. The drugs are not down ninety-seven percent. There was no regime change worth the word. Mail-in voting is not mail-in cheating, and they are perfectly aware you can verify all of it in an afternoon. The lie is not built to be swallowed. It is built to be exhausting, to grind the reality-testing muscle of your mind down to a stub, until one ordinary morning you stop testing altogether and simply accept whatever the loudest voice in the room has decided is true today. The objective is not your agreement. The objective is your surrender, the moment you conclude it is easier to let them define the real than to keep flinching at each new assault on the obvious.
Which is exactly why the flinch matters more than you have been led to believe. The mindfuck only completes itself when you mistake it for your own frailty, when the lurch in your gut reads to you as weakness rather than as a smoke detector performing its single honest job. The day they win is not the day they stop lying, because they will never stop lying. The day they win is the day you stop noticing, the day the grotesque finally registers as ordinary weather, and you reach for an umbrella instead of an alarm. So stay mindfucked, in the only sense that has ever counted. Keep flinching. Keep naming each absurdity as an absurdity, out loud, in the present tense, before the chorus can quietly refile it under normal. Your anger is not the thing that has gone wrong with you. Your anger is the last instrument in the house they have not managed to recalibrate, the needle still pointing true while everything around it has been tuned to lie. Guard that needle with everything you have left. It is, at this hour, very nearly the whole of the resistance.
MINDFUCK happens to you early in life, by an older brother, by your first grade teacher who you've tuned out, but presidential.briefing room is MASS MINDFUCK!