When you think psychological warfare, the first thing that comes to mind is likely “MKUltra”, the CIA‘s brainwashing experiment on willing and unwilling citizens.

What we are witnessing now is mass-scale psychological warfare. Raise your hand if at any time this week you had an issue with the following:

I have. I slept for the first time in a week and ate more than a few bites of food. My mind’s been racing, and my anxiety spikes when my phone notifications go off because I’m afraid of what the news will be.

I’ve spoken to many people here and elsewhere who are going through similar things. We’re already exhausted. Every day feels like the intro to a dystopian horror movie. Anyone with any sense of empathy or morality is rightfully shocked and horrified by the ICE raids, the loss of rights, the women dying under the abortion bans, the trans people who are being erased.

And again, this is just over a week at the time of this writing. And this has been ongoing for much longer than our most recent shitstorm.

I would argue that the American people have been steadily undergoing psychological warfare since at least 2001, with the 9/11 attacks, and our government has been ramping up the attacks on our collective mental health ever since.

I remember watching the 9/11 attacks in grade school. I remember going to school the next day (because the Catholic schools didn’t close where I was) and thinking how quiet and creepy it was without planes flying overhead. As I grew up, I, and my entire generation, witnessed one disaster after another. The financial crisis and the subsequent years that followed where most of us found that our years in college were a waste of time and money. Money, of course, that we didn’t have, as we were struggling to get footing. And on and on. My generation is one of massive trauma that we have never been able to recover from—it never ends.

In the wake of our 24/7 news cycle and now what seems to be the end of our nation, we have no real relief. I could link every horrible thing that’s happened, but that would take all day. You can just check your news feed. But a short recap, we have a giant diaper baby and a rich wanna-be supervillain as our leaders, and our rights and our government are being dismantled right before our eyes. We are quickly becoming the gods-awful amalgamation of 1930s Germany and 1970s Iran. And our leaders, who took a vow to defend the constitution, are doing nothing at best, and preemptively complying at worst. And we’re the unwilling captive audience. This is by design.

Think about it. How many of you reading this right now are doing so at some soul-sucking job that you hate? How many of you have barely had time to rest and really process everything going on while also trying to manage the mundane, every day bullshit like cleaning and cooking? How many of you look at your coworkers and wonder how they’re acting so fucking normal about all of this? How many of you have been going to work sick and fearful? How many of you are red-lining, but know you can’t afford to take any time off to recover?

I went into this briefly in a piece here on my own publication, as to why we’re not seeing the massive uprising that we see in say, France. Our system was built for this. It was absolutely in perfect condition for a dictator to come along, because most of us are so burned out just struggling to keep the little that we have to fight back. And now the second part of this comes to play.

Here is a list of the most common forms of psychological warfare, and you can see how many are being used by the far-right and fascists in our government.

Psychological warfare (PW) is a set of actions that aim to reduce an opponent's mental well-being or morale. It can be used in many ways, including:

This is the goal, to wear us down, break our moral, and render us ineffective and scared for ourselves and our loved ones. Do I believe Trump really believes in or cares about half the shit that he’s done? No. But the ones who pull his strings want a quiet, compliant nation that they can control. They want dead kids and broken spirits. The way that this is being accomplished is two-fold. Keep the population scared, and trap us in situations where we have no recourse to make change. And yes, that includes being unable to take time off of your shitty, stressful bullshit job thanks to the crushing weight of bills that you need to pay. You can’t take care of yourself because you need your job to take care of yourself.

Both my partner and I are on maintenance meds. If I don’t take them, I sleep, eat, work, and do nothing else. The fatigue, which is bad enough due to lack of sleep right now, is 100 times worse, and it’s constant. Cruising on caffeine, like I did for 10 years before finding the right meds, doesn’t cut it.

My partner will die without theirs. We rely on our jobs to be able to afford the luxury of living. So, as tiny orange Hitler continues to take our rights away, we have no recourse, yet. I don’t know when we’ll hit rock bottom enough that the majority that are apathetic and burying their heads in the sand will join with us. I don’t have an answer for that.

In the meantime, please recognize that you are one person and cannot pay attention to everything all at once. It’s maddening, and you will get sick. I should know, because I never take my own advice and I am starting to wear down hard. I have been what my partner calls “red-lining” since 2017, between personal trauma, multiple deaths of loved ones, Covid, unemployment, my horrible job, and the diaper king. The list is endless. I am sure many people haven’t recovered from dipshit’s first term. I know I haven’t.

But you (and I) do need to take care of ourselves. A few things we can do:

Then, afterwards, find something constructive to do to fight back against diaper king’s regime, such as:

And remember, you are not alone. None of us are.