Fear and Loathing in America
How the illusion of an unstoppable force becomes self-fulfilling—and how to stop it.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” —Mark Twain
After writing an essay on Red Caesarism and America’s accelerating slide into dictatorship, a confluence of events sent me into a near panic attack yesterday: the Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey; Donald Trump signed a new presidential memorandum making it a terrorist act to support antifascism; Pete Hegseth called a unique, ominous meeting of the entire military leadership; and I was in contact with two sets of lawyers about frivolous lawsuits against me—one from the current FBI Director Kash Patel, and the other from treasonous retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn.
There is a certain point nearly every day where I briefly wonder if any of this is real. Five years ago, I was building virtual reality games. Now… this? How the hell did I get into this mess? What happened to my country? Why bother with any of it?
I should just go dark and keep my head down, right?
For some people, I understand that decision. But that’s not how I was raised. Or how I live my life. I don’t seek conflict, but if conflict is required to do the right thing, then so be it.
The psychological and societal terror the Trump regime is inflicting is designed to create fear, despair, and weariness. They want everyone to make the decision that it’s just better to stay out of the line of fire. And they have a lot of help—from our own institutions.
The decisions of Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times) to pull their editorial boards’ endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election was the start of a long series of capitulations to the Trump regime that has only accelerated. When symbols of American liberal democracy like mainstream media outlets become corrupted, it is demoralizing for everyone else. It feels like a sign of an unstoppable force.
That force was and is an illusion, but it’s an illusion that becomes self-fulfilling—not because the threat is as real as imagined, but because imagining it as a real threat gives it the same power.
The illusion is created by the deliberate application of hybrid warfare—a combination of psychological, legal, governmental, and kinetic tactics—that serves to create the 360-degree sense of a high-speed, high-intensity threat environment that prevents people from making well-considered decisions.
What the Trump regime and his sycophants like Patel and Flynn have perfected is the stimulation of a physiological reaction to stress called hypervigilance. This short circuits normal decision-making, diverting control from your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain that handles deliberation—to your fear center, the amygdala, which is far simpler. It gives you three choices: fight, freeze, flee.
What I experienced as a near panic attack was a freeze reaction to an overwhelming number of stressors that left me largely inoperable for an hour or so—exactly what people like Trump, Flynn and Patel are looking for. However, I was able to work through those emotions quickly by naming them, describing to myself what I was feeling and why, and reminding myself this was a bad time to make any rash decisions.
A significant part of my own personal journey over these years has been a great inhalation of history—of all kinds—and of the words of the people who created it. This has given me a new set of tools to deal with my own doubts and fear. For example:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Inspiring speeches aside, we are in a historic moment, not of achievement, but of failure. We are watching what appears to be complete breakdown in the system of norms, discourse, government, rule of law, and shared reality. It is justifiably terrifying, but in other ways unsurprising, right? Trump told us; Project 2025 told us; Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia told us; the Heritage Foundation told us. We knew what they planned to do—they’re just doing it now.
But no matter what the small group of people in the government and the people who want us to capitulate to dictatorship say or do, it is still the choice of every single American to continue to live your life, exercise your rights, and fight whatever fight you must to protect the Constitution, the rule of law, and the core values of liberal democracy.
There are way more of us than them. The only way they can contain us is to control us. The only way to control us is through fear.
Whatever happens—and a lot will—remember that your fear is the most powerful weapon they have. You cannot prevent the emotion, but you can prevent it from becoming your captor. Understand hypervigilance, operant loops and how trauma is the gateway to psychological control.
Naming things like emotions, just to yourself, as mundane as that sounds, is psychologically very powerful, because it forces the fear center to yield control to higher brain function. This is how I got through my brief panic attack.
There are no panaceas; naming something doesn’t make it go away, but it does make it finite. It is much easier to deal with a concept than an overwhelming emotion.
In the same way, Donald Trump is finite. This regime is finite. This dreadful slide into clownish autocracy is finite.
How this dreary chapter comes to an end is not possible to predict—but like all chapters, it will close. It’s up to us whether we want to be there to write the next one.
“Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.” —Hunter S. Thompson
Long live a free America. Glory to Ukraine.
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Trump declared antifa a terrorist organization. Interesting. All of our parents and grandparents who fought in WWll were terrorists who were sent to fight Hitler by a terrorist American government. This also means that Trump is turning the US into a fascist regime on purpose. I guess he wants to be just like Hitler.
Really good column today! I've been working on an essay on terrorism that takes the word 'terror' back to its Indo-European root tre-, which meant 'to tremble', “to shake with fear.” From this root developed the Latin verb terrēre (“to frighten, to cause to tremble”), which in turn produced terror (“great fear, dread, alarm”). The sense of trembling—an involuntary bodily reaction—remained central: terror was not merely fear as an idea, but fear as something that seizes the body, making it shudder. This is not the terrorism of violence, but the terrorism of pure intimidation. It is terrorism absent any ideology except the ideology of power. This is the state of terrorism that has come to America-- not through Antifa, but through the craft of Project 2025 and the denizens of the Trump regime.