0:09
The Devil We Got Used To: Normalcy Bias, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the Art of the Fake Redemption Arc
Every one of us wakes up most mornings expecting the day to behave itself, like a dog that has never once bitten anyone and therefore we assume never will. That expectation has a name. Psychologists call it normalcy bias, and it is the quiet, stupid, completely unearned assumption that whatever happened yesterday is probably going to happen again today. Normalcy bias does not require your life to be good. It only requires your life to be boring in a way you can predict. If you are the kind of person who orders a Filet-O-Fish every single Friday like it is a religious sacrament, normalcy bias is what makes you assume McDonald’s will have fish on a random Friday afternoon, and when some regional supply chain hiccup leaves you standing at the counter being told they are out, you will feel a rage completely disproportionate to the price of the sandwich. That is not about the fish. That is about the universe breaking a promise it never actually made you.
Here is the part people miss: normalcy does not mean good. It just means normal. A person can be in a genuinely miserable situation and still develop a normalcy bias around the misery, because even suffering has a rhythm you can set your watch to, the same way you can get used to a smoke detector chirping every night at 3 a.m. and eventually just sleep through the apocalypse. Say you are in your twenties, dating someone you argue with so constantly that neither of you actually likes the other anymore, but the arguing has become the metronome of the relationship, the background hum of the whole operation. You expect to fight. You expect to make up. You expect Tuesday to look like every other miserable Tuesday. Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, she dumps you. It was not out of nowhere. There were a hundred signs, all of them screaming, all of them ignored, because the daily dysfunction had become so routine that the actual ending felt like getting hit by a bus you swore only existed in other people’s neighborhoods. Psychologists call that specific gut-punch an expectancy violation, the moment reality snaps a pattern you had unconsciously bet your whole nervous system on continuing. For a lot of people that snap is genuinely traumatic, whether what came before was good, bad, or just a low simmering disaster you had learned to call home.
Politics runs on this exact mechanism, except it runs on it constantly, at national scale, with worse hair and significantly more lying. A country settles into a normal. Something detonates that normal. The country picks through the rubble and calls the wreckage a new normal. Then something detonates that one too. Rinse, repeat, forever, like a horror movie franchise that keeps getting sequels nobody asked for because the first one made money. It is not a bug in how democracies process shocks, it is closer to the operating system. The real question is not whether the cycle keeps spinning, because it absolutely will, it is what quietly gets shoved into the category of “fine, whatever” every time the wheel turns, and whether anybody has the stomach to admit what just got swallowed.
And here is the sneaky part: the cycle never announces itself while it is happening. Nobody gets a push notification saying, hey, the baseline just moved, please adjust your outrage settings accordingly. The new normal just kind of oozes in overnight, like mold, and within a year or two the thing that would have ended a career under the old normal barely rates a shrug and a scroll past in the new one. That is how genuinely deranged behavior gets laundered into background noise, and it works best precisely when nobody bothers to point at it and go, hey, wait a second.
From 1789 to 2016, the American presidency operated inside guardrails that both parties, whatever else they were lying about, mostly agreed to respect. Plenty of corruption in there. Plenty of cruelty, incompetence, scandal, the occasional flash of real heroism, the whole ugly buffet of human government. But underneath all of it sat one non-negotiable rule: you run, you win or you lose, and if you lose, you accept it like an adult and get out of the building. Forty-four transitions of power happened this way, through wars, depressions, and assassinations, and the losing side always eventually took the L and went home. Then, on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator like a Bond villain who forgot to buy a volcano lair, announced he was running for president, and the rules that had held for two hundred twenty-six years started disintegrating in real time, because it turns out normalcy bias does not check your IQ, your resume, or how many books you have written before it grabs you by the throat.
Marc Lamont Hill, a genuinely sharp cultural commentator, went on The Breakfast Club in August of 2016 and told Charlamagne, DJ Envy, and Angela Yee, “I’m not scared of Trump.
5:35
Why Michigan Is The Epicenter of the Democratic Party's Future
News broke of Graham Platner’s sexual assault allegation during my live chat with progressive commentator and organizer Jess Craven. We discussed it while talking about a bigger conversation happening within American politics, which is the rising, bipartisan rage against the broligarchy and what is deemed “the establishment.”
Spoiler alert: Jess and I believe Platner should resign in light of this credible accusation. Mainers decided to back him despite his troubling history because they wanted a political outsider who reflected their positions. Janet Mills, the establishment candidate, refused to adapt or evolve. Still, the Democratic Party and its donors doubled down on her and were opposed to Platner even before the scandals.
Why?
He represents their waning influence and power over the party. Melat Kiros just won by double digits in Colorado as a Democratic Socialist who is against ICE, forever wars, the broligarchy, and Israel’s genocide. Mamdani is an extremely popular mayor of NYC who is getting things done by flexing his power. His three picks in New York all swept, including Darializa Chevalier, who overcame a nasty and racist smear campaign days before the elections.
Maybe you can dismiss these wins as aberrations. After all, New York is a cesspool of godless, gay, Muslim, atheist, Marxist vegans.
But what about Michigan? You know, the Rust Belt? The swing state? The heartland?
That’s what Abdul El-Sayed is doing right now. He’s up against Haley Stevens, who is AIPAC’s groomed candidate. Mallory McMorrow just suspended her campaign over the weekend. Despite the polls having El-Sayed beating Republican Mike Rogers, the Democratic establishment and its acolytes still say he is “unelectable.”
The Michigan race reflects the divide within the Democratic Party and will reveal if the establishment has finally lost its reach and control.
***Because I’m a terrible capitalist, here’s a great 25% off discount for new paid subscribers. It’ll only be about $3.75/month or $38/year.
There are no paywalls, and The Left Hook continues depending on the kindness of our readers
Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.
8:06
The Coming Storm – the Many versus the Money
Labels libel.
I am a
· Liberal
· Conservative
· Radical
· Idealist
· Materialist
· Skeptic
· Mystic
· Cynic
· Humanist
· Capitalist
· Socialist
– simultaneously, alternately, depending on how I slept and what I’ve eaten. Any label makes a mockery of my beliefs, which shift shapes like clouds in the sky. Today’s thoughts may refute yesterday’s – and so they should, for who knows for sure has stopped thinking.
Why deploy labels? To simplify, justify, vilify. Playground taunts whiz like spitballs to goad, hurt. The Nameless One’s our Labeler-in-Chief: MAGA! RINO! COMMUNIST! Labels spare us the ordeal of articulation. Labeling makes wimps feel wise and fools brave.
The scary label du jour is “Democratic Socialist” so I thought I’d look them up. What do these ogres stand for? How do they threaten our Republic?
The press is leading the charge here with label-libeling. Journalists like a good war, the bloodier the better. Wars attract attention, fatten wallets. Journalists may loathe the Nameless One, but they love his limelight. One beef against Biden was he governed too quietly.
The recent election of Democratic Socialists presages a vicious war for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party (we hope, we hope). The old guard is shaking in its boots as the youngbloods sharpen their knives. I myself felt wary of these sans-culottes. Might their radicalism wreck America?
Turns out, these hellions are very radical. They stand for
· Universal health care
· Strong labor unions and greater worker bargaining power
· Higher taxes on the wealthy
· Reduced economic inequality
· Tuition-free or heavily subsidized public higher education
· Expanded public housing and social programs
· Stronger regulation of large corporations
· Robust environmental policies, including government investment in clean energy
· Campaign-finance reform and measures to reduce the influence of money in politics
in Alistair’s succinct summation. So do I. So do most folks not flummoxed by lies or crazed by avarice. Our body politic, the consensus concurs, is sick, running a high fever, breaking out in scabrous boils. Each of these maniacal measures would improve the condition of the Many at the expense of the monied few. None would upend our state. Where’s the risk?
The risk is fewer billionaires – and perhaps, oh my gosh, NO trillionaires, at least for the foreseeable future. The risk is a cleaner planet, a better-trained healthier workforce, and for the Many more livable lives. The risk is less chance of politicians being bought and renewed belief that our votes count.
Nor, it turns out, are any of these proposals radical. The only argument against them is the expense. How can we afford all these programs AND tax-cuts for billionaires AND gilded monuments to our chief AND exorbitant, incompetent wars!
Golly gee.
There is a war in America, but it’s not among the partisans who wish democracy well. It’s a war between the rich and the rest. If younger citizens feel sickened by the status quo and restless for change, who can blame them? The present generation of politicians has made a mess of things. Notwithstanding relative prosperity, we the people are glum. We need fresh energy, idealism, determination. We need to bump incumbents and invigorate those who remain.
Things are bad in America – and for the next few months, until the November election, they’re likely to get worse, as the Nameless One connives to steal the nation he’s supposed to serve. The good news is the bad news. The mismanagement of America is so obvious and vile, all but the most complacent will be roused to preserve what we prize. In the war between the Many and Money, I bet on the Many. The label I aspire to is Patriot.
12:13
The Adaptation Deficit: Why Western Militaries are Behind in the Race to Learn
Recently, my report on the systemic learning disorder in western military organisations, their inability to learn and adapt quickly from other people’s wars, was published by the Lowy Institute. Long time readers of Futura Doctrina will recognise the theme. I explored a lighter version of the same institutional pathology in my piece last week on the Great Emu War of 1932, which showed an Australian Army that had forgotten, in just fourteen years, everything it once knew about matching force to problem.
This report is the contemporary version of that same argument, applied to the institutions of Western defence today. Key findings in the report include the following:
Western military institutions exhibit a systemic learning deficit that prioritises exploitation of existing competencies over exploration of new solutions. The result is dangerously slow adaptation to battlefield innovations, demonstrated in Ukraine and Iran despite unprecedented access to openly available evidence.
The inability to rapidly implement proven innovations is a failure of organisational culture, of promotion systems that reward conformity over innovation, and of political leadership that fails to demand institutional accountability for learning.
If Western nations are to compete with the new authoritarian learning and adaptation bloc formed by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, an array of rapid organisational, cultural, technological, and leadership philosophy changes is needed in military institutions, including in Australia.
Below is the introduction to give you a taste for the contents of my report.
Technological advances will not change the essential nature of war. Fighting will never be an antiseptic engineering exercise. It will always be a bloody business subject to chance and uncertainty in which the will of one nation will be pitted against another, and the winner will be the one that can inflict more punishment and absorb more punishment than the other side. But the way punishment gets inflicted has been changing for centuries, and it will continue to change in strange and unpredictable ways. — Max Boot
In 2023, a Russian A-50 airborne early warning aircraft was attacked on the ground at the Machulishchy airbase near Minsk. Located 200 kilometres from the Ukrainian frontline, the Russian Air Force had not imagined, nor prepared for, an attack on this location. In March 2026, a United States Air Force (USAF) E-3 Sentry airborne early warning aircraft, parked in the open at a Saudi Arabian airbase approximately 700 kilometres from Iran, was destroyed during Operation Epic Fury, the American-Israeli campaign against Iran. There was one key difference between these attacks: the USAF had years of warning about the threat, which it did not heed. It demonstrated a lack of learning from other people’s wars.
At the strategic level, an even more recent glaring failure to learn is obvious. The Trump administration has failed to learn the central political lesson from the war in Ukraine: even supposedly much weaker nations in a war have agency. Such belligerents can demonstrate the will to resist foreign military aggression for years, if needs be. This has been the case for over four years in Ukraine and appears to be the case in the Iran war.
The contrast between Western institutional learning inertia and the speed of adversarial learning is one of the defining strategic facts of this decade. Western governments and militaries have been slow to institutionalise the lessons of Ukraine and Iran. Their adversaries have not. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have built an authoritarian knowledge market in which battlefield insights, from drone employment to electronic warfare, from industrial mobilisation to strategic coercion, flow more rapidly than many Western institutions have acknowledged. When one member of this bloc learns, all of them can learn.
Organisations can exhibit persistent failures to learn. The foundational work of theorists Chris Argyris and Donald Schön distinguished between “single-loop” learning, correcting errors within existing frameworks, and “double-loop” learning, which requires questioning the underlying assumptions themselves. Military institutions are archetypal single-loop learners. They excel at tactical adaptation within doctrinal boundaries but can be structurally resistant to revising core doctrines. Organisations can fall into “competency traps” where they reinforce familiar routines even when those routines no longer serve the environment.
While military units in the West have demonstrated an admirable vigour to learn the lessons of foreign wars, this same energy has not been apparent in their broader military and political institutions. Indeed, mainly because of the speed of change, much of the transformation in war of the past half-decade appears to have eluded defence bureaucracies.
17:38
Trump’s frantic social media spiral was disturbing, even for him
Just after midnight following America’s 250th birthday fireworks, the President of the United States was already back on Truth Social, beginning what would become one of the most frantic social media spirals we have seen from him in a long time. Over the course of the day, he posted or reposted more than 100 times, including 67 posts in just two hours. He shared white nationalist language, attacked a federal judge, reposted a racist caricature of the Obamas, reduced Hillary Clinton to a comparison of her physical appearance against a woman two decades younger, and posted a “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED” meme aimed at Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, just 48 hours before they are expected to share a room at a NATO summit. This was not the behavior of a president in control. It was a man in free fall, reaching for his phone because it is the only thing left that makes him feel powerful.
But the most disturbing image appeared without warning: an unmistakable piece of authoritarian propaganda depicting Trump as a towering black silhouette dwarfing fighter jets, his arm outstretched toward a horizon consumed by fire and smoke, as if commanding a nation toward war. There was nothing American about it. Nothing democratic. And buried in the spree was the most honest thing he has said in months. He wrote that if Democrats add states, expand representation, and eliminate the filibuster, “it will be impossible for a Republican to ever be elected President again.” He was not describing cheating. He was describing a fair system, and admitting his party cannot survive one. What he wants is a rigged system.
And not a single one of those 100-plus posts was about making anyone’s life better. Not healthcare, not wages, not the cost of groceries. Because there is nothing to point to. His war with Iran produced no victory. His Reflecting Pool became a national embarrassment. His July 4th centerpiece ended with supporters stranded in a thunderstorm while he waited until 11:15 to misquote the Declaration of Independence.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Patriot Front members marched through Washington, and his own Interior Secretary could not bring himself to condemn them. Division is not a consequence of this presidency. It is the only product it has consistently delivered, and he needs more of it now than ever, because it shifts the conversation away from his failures and toward each other. The posting spree is not the behavior of a man who is winning. It is the behavior of a man who knows the ground is shifting beneath him. The midterms are four months away.
See the full story in the video.
We are living through a pivotal moment for our country, and my goal is to reach as many people as possible with clear, factual information about what is happening. The more people who understand what is unfolding, the better our chances of pushing back against chaos, cruelty, and corruption ahead of the midterms.
Thank you for your continued support. Your paid subscriptions have enabled me to add a video editor and reach more people.
Independent journalism is under attack. You can make a difference with a $5/month paid subscription. Your support allows me to keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in our country, defend myself from constant pressure from MAGA extremists, and ultimately spread the message to more people.
I’m fighting to save our country (before it’s too late).
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
This video is based on my written post, available HERE, and based on the events of 7-5-2026.
*This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Sources:
https://www.aol.com/articles/trump-floods-truth-social-over-231304433.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-rages-as-trumps-fireworks-fiasco-descends-into-chaos/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/patriot-front-march-washington-dc-july-4_n_6a4a6dd1e4b03060a850d352
22:09
Welcome to Donald Trump’s surveillance state
At 9:27 this morning, the President walked into the Oval Office, excited to once again be the first to do something. He was almost giddy as he made small talk while the event got underway, his attention captured by the large gold bell sitting on his desk. “I’m going to ring that bell. And does that bell stay in the White House? Because I’m not giving it back. We’re going to put that in the middle of the new ballroom. I’m not going to give that bell back.
22:45
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool needs millions of dollars in repairs
Photo credit: AP Photo | Nathan Howard
The morning newsletter is still cooking, please stay tuned. In the meantime…
Trump to NATO: President Trump heads to this week's NATO summit with a strengthened hand after securing allies' commitments to increase defense spending and helping broker a ceasefire that ended the Iran war.
23:13
Transcript: Henry Paulson at CCG event
On 10 June 2026, the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) convened its latest CCG VIP Luncheon themed “Evolving China-U.S. Dynamics and Global Strategic Outlook”.
The event featured Henry M. Paulson, Jr., founder and chairman of the Paulson Institute, executive chairman of TPG Rise Climate, and 74th Secretary of the Treasury under U.S. President George W.
23:44
Qatari LNG Tanker Hit East of Limah, Oman. Strait of Hormuz Southern Corridor Available
So a tanker was hit by something, about 8 nautical miles east of Limah, Oman, and it caught fire on its port side. This happened while the tanker was traveling southbound. Luckily, no one was hurt and there's no sign of any environmental damage from the incident.
The UK Maritime Trade Operations got a report from the ship's captain and issued a warning on Monday evening. Now authorities are looking into what exactly happened. The Strait of Hormuz's southern corridor is still available, so that's a good thing.
It's still unclear what hit the tanker, but an investigation is underway to figure that out. For now, things seem to be under control, and that's the latest on this incident.
24:39
Cuba Total Power Failure Prompts Embassy Security Alert for U.S. Citizens
CUBA — Cuba’s electrical grid collapsed on July 6, producing a total power failure across the country that began at 12 p.m. Eastern Time, the U.S. Embassy in Havana stated in its security alert.
The U.S. Embassy alert stated that Cuban state media reported the reason for the collapse and any timeline for restoring power remained unknown at the time the alert was issued.
Cellphone and internet outages were reported in connection with the power loss. The embassy directed all U.S.
