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Akiko's avatar

During covid, I started feeling like I was in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I would regularly think, “What is happening to this person?” It was like they couldn’t really think anymore. They were doing a facsimile of thinking and were not fully themselves the way they used to be. This has become a permanent feature. Even people I’ve been friends with since grade school, and who I still genuinely care about, just seem different. It’s like a disease where some of them can’t reply to what I actually said. Or they’re just otherwise illogical. Like, if I said, “I don’t really use the doggie door, I just open up the whole door when my dogs want to go out,” someone might reply, “You mean you don’t mind when your dogs pee inside??” Which isn’t what I said at all! I feel as if I’m having all these conversations where whatever I say bounces off the other person’s skull, does a couple of somersaults, and then enters their brains in a slightly altered form.

The other day I told a normie relative I’ll call Bob that someone on one of my son’s rec sports teams said it would feel good to shoot Trump in the face. And Bob said, “Well I heard someone call Pelosi the C word. So both sides are remarkably the same, although they deny it.” In what alternate reality is calling Pelosi a c*** “remarkably the same” as saying it would feel good to shoot Trump in the face? Anyway, maybe the turning point happened awhile ago, and it created a population that just flat-out can’t really think anymore, and that we’re expecting and hoping the normies are going to see en masse how leftists are crazy. And I just don’t think they are going to see that. In fact, I think it’s impossible.

Oh, I just thought of another great example! I mentioned the vaccine mandates to someone I’ve been friends with since grade school, and she said, “There were no vaccine mandates.” After some back-and-forth, I found that she was serious. So what is one to do about people like that? She’s a perfectly intelligent person.

I keep thinking of a documentary I saw about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A man who lived through it was trying to explain something to the interviewer, and he simply said, “We went mad.”

(Sorry this is so long!)

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Bret's avatar

I think it's too late already. Writing this from New York City, where by all accounts, an anti-semitic Muslim who wants to disband much of the police department is about to become mayor -- improbably supported by young white liberals whose indoctrination masks their self-loathing and calls it social justice.

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