Paracosmic Mosaicism: Projectile Pizzagate and the Mutation of MAGA
How the cult of Trump is splintering as he loses his mojo—and the vultures circle
“I will take all the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories every day over the Ministry of Truth.”
—Peter Thiel, 2021
Losing His Mojo
The President of the United States is severely mentally ill due to a converging set of pathologies that amplify each other. The symptoms of his dementia, malignant narcissism, and narcissistic collapse make Donald Trump far more dangerous than he’s ever been. And the only guarantee is that he will get worse.
What is different about this latest round of behavior is that it’s no longer working on anyone—not even his own base and loyal propagandists. In technical terms, he is losing his mojo.
Trump is currently flooding over 10,000 additional troops into the Middle East while he claims to be negotiating for peace with Iran. In fact, he is caught in an escalation trap while setting up for a ground invasion, a move that may expand the current disaster into a historic calamity—and a potential world war. Even among Trump’s most ardent supporters, this is wildly unpopular, but he cannot be seen to lose, no matter what it costs.
Trump is also having the zombified remains of the Justice Department drop all charges against the most serious J6 defendants—Proud Boys and Oathkeepers who already had their seditious conspiracy sentences commuted. Trump wants to permanently rewrite history to erase his own crimes. It’s unclear that this will help him with his base either. There was no public outcry for this.
The degenerating president also continues to attack the Pope and Christianity, using memes and his own Messiah Complex to suggest that he can go over Leo’s head straight to Jesus. Trump cannot help himself; this is clinical delusional grandiosity.
To be clear, Trump doesn’t think he is actually Jesus, but he refuses to allow anyone to be seen above him on any plane of existence—even ones he doesn’t believe in.
Nor was Trump’s meme just about his imagined intimacy with Jesus. It was also yet another promotion of Pizzagate mythology, the weaponized narrative that Donald Trump is a savior who will uncover a cabal of elite Satanic pedophiles and “Save the Children”—from Democrats.
Projectile Pizzagate
There were two other recent references to Pizzagate from top Trump officials within the same 24 hours as Trump’s meme.
On Tuesday, at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia, JD Vance claimed that he’d been browsing around the Epstein files and happened upon an email about “pizzas and grape sodas or something like that.”
He went on to compare it directly to Pizzagate, promised an investigation, and blatantly lied that the emails showed Donald Trump was never friends with Epstein.
“And I remember it sounded like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, but here it was in an email from a guy. And my reaction to that was, we should absolutely investigate that person. Okay? And you remind me, I’m going to follow up on that to see whether we’ve investigated that person because we should.
And if you look at the emails, it’s obvious that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald J. Trump.”
At the same event, newly minted Catholic JD Vance said Pope Leo, the Vicar of Christ, “should be careful with teaching theology.” He also boasted that denying funding to Ukraine was “one of the proudest things” he had done in the administration.
In the bigger picture, JD Vance can be seen as an avatar for Peter Thiel and the greater techno-fascist broligarchy. And it was Thiel himself who closely partnered with Jeffrey Epstein and the Russians at the origin of Pizzagate.
Then on Wednesday at the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked Jack Posobiec for her first question. Posobiec was the chief promoter of Pizzagate in 2016. He targeted Comet Pizza in DC as a child-trafficking hub, a smear that ended with a gunman searching for non-existent children in the basement—and going to prison instead.
Below is Posobiec’s second question, a carbon copy of Pizzagate: smearing Democrats to deflect from Donald Trump’s long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
POSOBIEC: Senator Ruben Gallego seemed very vocal about wanting the release of the Epstein files. And yet, when questions come to his own involvement with Eric Swalwell, he doesn’t seem to want to supply anything.
LEAVITT: And why were they silent for so long? I think those are questions that must be raised of these sitting representatives, including Mr. Gallego. And I hope that the journalists in this room will do their jobs in the journalist on Capitol Hill will do their jobs to ask Democrats in power how they knew about such despicable behavior from one of their elected representatives for so long, but never said or did anything about it. So that’s what we hope to see as far as the White House and the president is concerned.
Leavitt not only embraced the smear, she instructed her handpicked group of journalists on what to do—to try to pin the serious criminal accusations against Eric Swalwell on all Democrats. This is the kind of thing that used to be restricted to MAGA DM rooms on Twitter. Now it’s just open psychological warfare in the Briefing Room.
Genetic Engineering of MAGA
The Trump regime’s coordinated Pizzagate campaign is a sign of deep desperation. It doesn’t get much lower than the Vice President name-dropping a ten-year-old Russian-backed propaganda campaign to defend the President from child rape accusations. But it is also a deliberate tactic to try to keep Trump’s most loyal brainwashed followers onside—by validating their most paracosmic conspiracy theories.
A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world thought generally to originate in childhood. Their conception is spontaneous, and the creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe, which may incorporate real-world or imaginary characters and conventions.
Trump’s follower base has always been an amalgam of groups that did not agree on everything, but were willing to give up part of their own identity to be absorbed into MAGA. Those groups continue to function together with shared ideological DNA, but to different degrees they still retain their own moral genetics.
The best metaphor I can find is mosaicism—when a person has two or more genetically different sets of cells in their body. This can be a benevolent condition from conception, or it can be malignant, based on later mutation.
Mosaicism refers to the occurrence of two or more genomes in an individual derived from a single zygote. Somatic mosaicism is a postzygotic mutation that occurs in the soma, and it may occur at any developmental stage or in adult tissues.
The mosaic of Trump’s various constituencies, which operated together as a single hive mind leading up to the election, has begun to mutate in different directions as Trump’s influence dissolves. The shared MAGA universe—a childish paracosm of bad guys (the “deep state”) and mysterious good guys (“Q”) fighting to arrest a cabal of pedophile Democrats—is simply wearing thin as Trump loses his ability to provide his followers with the fuel for their delusions.
The volley of Pizzagate references is a blatant attempt to use the remaining shreds of JD Vance’s credibility with Trump’s base to revitalize old psychological operations—psyops whose effectiveness dies a little more with every rise in gas prices and every self-deifying meme Trump posts.
Paracosmic Mosaicism
The narrative world, the paracosm, that built Trump’s movement online and sustained his followers through endless lies and disappointments, has never changed and never will. It is the very essence of being MAGA to believe in the deep state, to want Hillary arrested, and to think Donald Trump is the savior. That’s why Pizzagate is back on the menu.
But the mosaic beneath MAGA—the people who had beliefs and identities of their own before Trump, both as individuals and as groups—is reasserting itself at the same pace that Trump is losing his mojo. This can be seen in his poll numbers, which continue to crash, and the speed with which he’s losing major MAGA stalwarts like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan and numerous others.
As the world veers off into a real existential crisis—due to the pathologies of one man and his enablers—a secondary crisis, of identity, is unfolding in more and more of us. Those around you who may have seemed utterly lost to MAGA may start to rediscover strands of their original identity, to find their own moral code that had been buried.
Do not mock them, or shun them, or say I told you so. This is the mosaic of humanity reasserting itself. It is what happens when a submerged conscience returns, and what was dark returns to the light.
“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” — Luke 8:17
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Threads: jimstewartson
Profound post and great Bible verse to cap it off. Thanks for your enlightened insight.
Thanks, JIm, for another insightful essay. I agree that as Trump appears to be less than all-powerful, some of his followers may experience the disorientation that comes when someone you needed to idealize, is no longer idealize-able.
I think Trump is decompensating under stress. The old defense mechanisms that used to work, like bullying, threatening, and outright aggression, aren’t working with Iran or the Epstein files. His own good feeling about himself, fragile at best under the blustery veneer of machismo, is weakening. He needs to use increasingly more grandiose images in the middle of the night to fend off the feelings of impotence and insignificance that haunt him during the day.
He desperately needs to identify with Jesus, a man powerful enough to get the love and attention of millions of people. And in the graphic below, he’s receiving the love of a tender, important man, who offers him the attention and affection he craved as an infant/toddler but never received.
This is a psychological crisis for Donald, and folks are trying to understand him using the wrong frames. This isn’t political or in any way a conscious strategy. This is a man breaking down, mentally and emotionally; grabbing images that will shore up his fragmenting sense of self.
What’s worrisome, and why we must remove him from power as quickly as possible, is that he could have a complete psychotic break and/or order the destruction of the world that’s “failed him,” as did the mother and father of his infancy and childhood.