This Is What Sociopaths Do

When projection becomes policy, cruelty becomes governance, and chaos becomes the point.

From time to time, we open this space to contributors outside our editorial team.

The piece below was submitted by an American who asked to remain anonymous. It’s not a policy paper or a political analysis. It’s a vent, a reflection of how at least one citizen sees this moment. We wonder how many of you will identify with those words.

We don’t care if guest writers have large followings or institutional backing. We care about seriousness, clarity, passion and intellectual honesty.

Read. Reflect. Share. The words below deserve it. - Being Liberal Editor

In this country, words mean nothing.
The President is the king of projection.
If he accuses someone else of doing something terrible, you can believe it’s actually something he himself has done, plans to do, or would do. If he says he didn’t do it, he actually did.

This administration ran on promises of peace. It has bombed 7 countries, Iran twice, and threatened several others.

In this country, when the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to someone else, the President demands it for himself, revokes his commitment to peace, and threatens to annex Canada and colonize Greenland. He does this despite the fact that the U.S. already has the right and permission to build up our military presence there without infringing on anyone’s rights or alienating our friends. Instead, in this country, we choose threats and chaos, upending the world order that has kept us safe for decades, just because the orange man is throwing a tantrum over not getting a trophy.

In this country, one man can decide if someone is guilty, without trial, and murder them.

In this country, one man blows Caribbean fishermen out of the water without evidence or trial, on the pretense that they’re keeping fentanyl out of the U.S. But there’s no fentanyl production in Venezuela. And there’s still no evidence those people were guilty of anything, let alone fentanyl trafficking. Most fentanyl prosecutions are U.S. citizens smuggling it in over the land border with Mexico.

In this country, we think it’s OK to bomb Iranian schoolchildren. We start unconstitutional wars on behalf of Netanyahu and murderous billionaire princes, despite the fact that it didn’t go through Congress; there was no good reason to strike; and there’s no actual plan other than to blame the Iranian people when it goes awry.

We had a deal with Iran, but because Obama’s name was on it, the President pulled out in 2018. He is the reason Iran went beyond our line in the sand. Because we pulled out of the deal.

There is no evidence that Iran was enriching uranium. 47 said he “obliterated” that capability months ago. His own Secretary of State said last week that Iran was not enriching uranium. Experts assess they were at least 10 years away from being able to build nukes. But in this country, we’re OK with the President taking a 400-million-dollar bribe in the form of a personal airplane and some Middle East oil and then lobbing bombs in return.

In this country, the President urges the Iranian people to take to the streets under penalty of death, while here at home, those who exercise their Constitutional rights are pepper-sprayed, shot, jailed, and labeled “terrorists” simply because they’re demanding our elected leaders follow our laws and stop wasting and stealing our money.

In this country, it doesn’t matter what the law says—if the President wants to imprison, torture, or deport you for accidentally rolling through a stop sign or for having brown skin or speaking Spanish, he can, and no one will stop him. In this country, we kidnap people off the streets, guilty until proven innocent, use our tax dollars to house them for weeks or months, then release most of them because they’ve done nothing wrong. We don’t care that they owe thousands in legal fees, didn’t get paid, lost their jobs, left fearful families behind, bewildered and afraid. Because that’s the price we’re willing to pay to train and desensitize immigration enforcement so that when it comes time to warehouse our nation’s own citizens for exercising their Constitutional rights and speaking out against the regime, those angry young men are locked and loaded, ready to act without hesitation.

In this country, the Department of Justice sports a picture of the President, announcing itself as merely the partisan enforcement arm of a mad cult leader. Lawyers with a conscience are resigning in droves. The others are selling their souls to hide the evidence in the Epstein files that this country elected a pedophile to its highest office. They seem to have illegally withheld an allegation that the President of the United States raped a 13-year-old child. But some of your neighbors are OK with that.

In this country, we vote for child rapists and make them immune from the laws the rest of us have to follow.

In this country, we let the government spy on its citizens, and we unleash the robots of war without restraint. Hegseth, who is completely unqualified to lead the Department of Defense, wants to use AI as a surveillance tool against any Americans who dare to exercise their Constitutional rights, and as a weapon unleashed without human oversight. Anthropic rightly said no.

In this country, we take revenge. Revenge on Anthropic means blacklisting them and accusing them of being a security threat for refusing to cooperate with the regime’s demands.

Don’t worry—in this country, there’s OpenAI.

In this country, millions of Republicans used to stand atop the Bill of Rights and demand privacy and personal freedom. Where are you all now? Why aren’t you screaming at the top of your lungs? I assure you, they will be listening.

In this country, the President puts Big Oil’s short-term gains over your family’s long-term survival. He sells the environmental riches of our public lands for his own power and profit.

In this country, we are pro-life—but only some lives, and only if they’re white, and not viable outside of the womb.

In this country, you can have three advanced degrees and three jobs and still not make enough to keep your head above water, and in this country, it will be your fault.

In this country, we want you to vote. But only with an ID. No, not that government-issued ID, but this one that costs more and requires more paperwork that costs more. And not if that’s your married name on your ID. And not if you’re too old or sick or far away because we no longer accept mail-in ballots. In this country, we want to make sure you get to the polls because the only way to vote safely is to vote like it’s 1776.

In this country, we’ll do anything to prevent voter fraud.

In this country, we rely on the stories that make us angry or afraid rather than on data to make the most impactful decisions of our time. No election outcome in this country has ever been affected by voter fraud. But we will commit to disenfranchising millions of voters just in case. In a quarter of a century of voting in Arizona, the percentage of fraudulent votes was .0000845%. In 30 years of Pennsylvania voting, there were only 39 cases of voter fraud in 100 million votes cast. The Heritage Foundation (an uber-conservative think tank) can find only three instances of non-citizens attempting to vote in Texas elections since 2012. All three were caught. But 250 blank ballots were mistakenly delivered to a Maine woman’s home by UPS, resulting in zero cases of voter fraud, so no one should ever be able to vote by mail again.

That would be like inspecting every shoe that ever boards an airplane because once, 20 years ago, someone happened to use a shoe to try to smuggle explosives aboard an airplane.

Oh, wait…

In this country, we prefer to be emotionally manipulated rather than following the facts because we’re more skilled in Netflix binging than we are in critical thinking. We want to feel like flying is safe rather than taking actions that will make it so. We want to feel like our elections are secure rather than actually having secure elections.

In this country, we want the right to die of diseases that had previously been eradicated, and to kill others in the process. In removing recommendations for life-saving vaccines, this administration opened the door to such vaccines not being covered by insurance in many states, because they are no longer “recommended” or “required.” Vaccines such as those for measles have been given safely millions and millions of times over, and effectively eradicated measles—until now. Outbreaks are occurring in multiple places around the country, endangering children and older folks now, and so many others down the line. But as one former friend and anti-vax mom once told me, “If your kid has cancer, it’s your responsibility to protect him, not mine. If my kid gets cancer, I’ll go live in a cave with him.”

In this country, instead of using safe, readily available modern miracles of vaccination and getting on with our lives, we bring our kids from chemo to caves to hide out from freedom-loving Luddites who failed sophomore biology.

This administration promised to make America healthy again. When the inflation report came out last week, it showed prices rising much faster than expected. RFK suggested we should just buy cheaper cuts of meat. Liver.

In this country, we should just eat liver and we’ll all be financially stable and healthy.

This administration promised to bring down the cost of everything, making life more affordable. Instead, grocery prices are crippling, in part due to his illegal tariffs (taxes on us), and in part due to the ever-increasing disparity between cost-of-living expenses and wages, the growing disparity between the uber-wealthy and the rest of us.

In this country, we should just shut up and pay to line their pockets.

In this country, you can’t plan for the future because a volatile leader makes for volatile markets.

In this country, everything is increasing in price while your wages are falling far behind.

In this country, billionaires take pleasure trips to space and place million-dollar bets on real war games that blow up real children.

In this country, instead of recognizing our enemy, we let him blind us, let him turn us against one another so that we do his work for him, for free.

I could go on, but you know all this already. Trump is a sociopath. This is what sociopaths do. To make himself feel bigger and better, he had to tear down everyone who came before him and everything they did, even if what they did was good for all of us. Because a sociopath constructs the world around him to reflect only his own image of himself, which is, when clinically defined, grandiose.

In this country, we don’t want an even playing field. We don’t want a fair shake at a decent reality. We want the chance, no matter how infinitesimally small, to be obscenely rich, and until we get that rich, we want to be dazzled to the point of blindness by those who are where we dream to be. We want Trump Tower. We want that man who gilds everything in gold like a totalitarian tsar and plasters his name and visage on every branch of government to erase our system of checks and balances symbolically as well as literally. He lines his pockets with our money, just like Putin and every other dictator, using the work of a nation’s people to make themselves untouchably rich. Even the Supreme Court, cherry-picked and partisan as it’s become, cannot help but call him out on it—but everyone stops short of holding him accountable.

And like every sociopath in history, when he’s backed into a corner, when he sees his approval rating has slipped to a mere 37%, he lashes out like a rabid animal. If a sociopath goes down, his laser focus is to take everyone and everything down with him. “If I can’t have it all, then no one can have any.” He’ll let Hegseth bomb a school to distract you from the Epstein files. Can’t afford to eat because your money is going to taxes/tariffs created by Trump? He’ll tell you to eat liver and like it, even when you’re screaming in pain from kidney stones and your cholesterol shoots through the roof.

In this country, the poor get sick and the sick get poorer.

In this country, you need to choose between prescription medication and dinner.

In this country, you need to choose between cancer treatment and keeping the roof you earned over your head.

In this country, the Surgeon General doesn’t even need to have graduated from medical school because knowledge is no longer valued.

In this country, if you can’t afford a concierge physician, just pray.

In this country, if we were awake, we would stop lining their pockets and take to the streets. We’d say “enough,” and we’d mean it.

In this country, they tell you to pray because religion is the opiate of the masses, and if we weren’t all on opiates, we’d be awake. And if we were awake, we would stop lining their pockets and take to the streets. We would rip them from their thrones and strip them of their ill-gotten gold. We would demand to work one job and earn enough to lead a good life. We’d tax the billionaires to feed the hungry, clothe the sick, shelter the poor, protect our planet, and rebuild the friendships we’ve destroyed.

We’d say “enough,” and we’d mean it.

---