Culture Wars & Cognitive Liberty

Q2/Q3 | 2021

Author

Taylor Kendal
December 29, 2025

You may well have missed this (and perhaps better for it), but about a month ago a relatively unknown podcaster posted a string of tweets outlining the alt-right/capitol riot justification, and reasoning as to why revolt appears not only reasonable but required these days. Tucker Carlson devoted 7+ minutes to it on his show, and then Trump himself retweeted it, at which point limbic systems were instantaneously hijacked at scale and all hell broke loose.

I'd been feeling the need to write something similar for ages but resisted because I can't stand the reactive, politically-driven, culture war washing machine––but figured this is a good group with which to woodshed the ideas. And if any of the conclusions don't jive with your own particulars, please just play through (for the golfers); it's the larger point and pattern, not the pissing match I'm trying to illuminate here.

So, if you, like me, have wondered why/how we've all got festering splinters in our minds these days––here's my sense of what's been happening (tayken from the shoulders of giants of course).

My sense is Russia gate is only one of several high-velocity epistemic schisms we've had in the past five years, and each one has prompted a specific maladaptive response in the collective psyche. We've all experienced some flavor of unraveling, so no need to convince yourself otherwise. 

A few poignant examples (and I’d be curious to know if you’re tracking others):

  1. Access Hollywood Tape:  Never has any national candidate survived a comparable smoking gun scandal. Without it, #Metoo would likely have never happened with the same virulence.

  2. Trump/Putin: Bizarre repeat coziness, never before seen between US and its arch rival. Combined with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and shock election, it prompted all sorts of WTF meaning scrambles as the poles shifted––suddenly Republicans were defending a special relationship with a KGB mastermind and Dems were looking to the FBI/CIA/NSA, who had been the villains of civil rights and social justice as their potential saviors.

  3. Mueller: Fit everyone's idea of a beyond reproach John Wayne father figure, and after two years of hyping and hoping that papa would sort it all out and put us back on the tracks of Platonic Truth...nada. He just sort of faded to black while Barr crowed from the rooftops "nothing to see here!" and bizarrely, everyone sort of went along with it, despite pages and pages of damning evidence.

  4. Epstein: TWO US PRESIDENTS AND THE ROYAL FAMILY directly and repeatedly implicated in a massive super shady who knows what and then the motherfucker up and dies in prison with no video tape! Were it not for Epstein, we may never have had QAnon and #savethechildren. His spooky island temple and little black book gave drooliong proof to the PizzaGate fever dream.

  5. Global/National/Partisan COVID response: The crisis playbook for the past fifty or so years has tasted distinctly of transnationalism, with orgs like the WHO and CDC leading the way, and all G 6+ Nations' leaders falling in line, generally sharing resources and data and emphasizing coordinated response to global events. (see initial 9/11 response). None of it was perfect, but that was at least the dominant coordinating narrative. Ahead to '20/'21 and we have the US Gov casting aspersions at those efforts, suppressing testing, slandering public health experts, refusing to mobilize a national emergency power to coordinate supplies (even within and for US citizens), explicitly suppressing aid to some states due to the political affiliation of their governors or voting persuasion of their citizenry, and, perhaps for the first time ever, making basic protocols like mask usage, a signifier of tribal identity. Seems to me a complete and utter abdication of national unity and global responsibility.

  6. George Floyd: His words "I can't breathe" ricocheted around the world, and became the rallying cry in Paris, London, and beyond. The notion of "to serve and protect" being overridden by a murderous cop and then militarized police response to peaceful protests (never mind the parsing of the event, actual stats on black on blue violence etc etc––just talking about the psychic shockwaves of the flashpoint itself). Without this and "good people on both sides of Charlottesville" it's unlikely we would have #defundthepolice, Antifa or CRT/Anti-racism resembling anything it does today. 

  7. LabLeak/NIH/Fauci: It's a bit like post-mortems showing that Bush Sr. insiders helped Bin Laden family members exit the US post 9/11. All a bit too cozy, too much overlap to be pure coincidence, wheels within wheels for crack-pot conspiracy fodder. And the fact that the fourth estate and even peer reviewed journals like the Lancet all fell in line, despite no compelling epidemiological "smoking gun" to confirm natural origin, fully undermined their later backtracking...and that's all to say nothing of the inept and shifting guidance from masks to distancing to vaxes. Are we still washing hands? 

  8. Capitol Riot: The party of law and order fomenting and even glorifying lawlessness (regardless how justified you think it was) is a HUGE flip for conservatives to be in that role and not the radical left––with half the right claiming victory and the other half claiming false flag op, is evidence of the deep epistemic confusion blanketing a nation.

Obviously. there are many more, at least half of which sprouted from the 4 years under/over Trump––from demonizing the Post Office as partisan stooges, to upending Tea Party deficit vigilance and breaking budgets, to voter suppression in a "free democracy" suddenly being talked about out loud, to RINO (not RiverNorth) now meaning a conservative who refused to bend the knee to Trumpism vs. the other way round, to "fake news" becoming the rallying cry of a president who produced more documented lies than any figure in history. It's all become classic territory of the schizophrenic double-bind, and the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance is to go sufficiently crazy, or to subscribe to a grand narrative that can EXPLAIN IT ALL...and here we are.

My sense is that partisans on both sides have been putting thumbs on the scales of their propaganda engines for a while, but if you had to call it out, I'd make the case that the Blue Church well and truly lost its mind during the Trump era due to many of the schisms mapped above (amplified by a total capture of right-wing news media), and upon realizing that the old rules of fair play and debate had been thoroughly shredded, abandoned their own standards of due process, fact-checking, right of reply, etc. with a reverberating vengeance. In fact, we found our way to the point where "liberals" are openly advocating for some of the most illiberal policies in the public sphere, in the name of leveling injustice.

#yesallmen #whitefragility (I may need a break from Twitter) could not exist as the "guilty until proven innocent" stand that they are, without the thorough trampling of good faith civil discourse.

Unfortunately, the Blue Church/mainstream media has been serving up a proper British hat trick of own goals, so they've lost huge chunks of whatever reasoned credibility they might have once held––the meritocrats and technocrats (see Reads below) that held claim to running media, government, academic and NGOs since Bretton Woods, have all effectively shat the bed, and we're now looking directly down the barrel at Turchin's thesis of overproduction of elites coming home (*see recent Atlantic article: The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse).

Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) JD Vance (Yale Law) Bannon (HBS/Goldman) Hawley (Stanford/Rhodes), Cruz (Princeton), and lots of others are exploiting the populist turn and there's nothing strong enough at the center of the old consensus to hold them back.

Far from an answer, much less a solution, but I hope that at least helps to map the wonky-ass terrain we've been traversing and maybe even sheds some light (or acts as tweezers) for the  splinters in your own mind. 

It’s not always fun to go back through a litany like that––in many cases we’d all prefer to forget what we’ve just been through––but in order to find our way back to common ground, I think it’s important to note all of the things that knocked us off track in the first place. As Becker (among others) point out, ignoring the Holocaust (or worse, our mortality) does little to create a path to a more equitable, just, or tolerable future. 

We haven’t gone crazy, the world has. And if we’re going to find our way back to mutuality, respect and shared commitments to Life, Liberty and that ever-elusive Pursuit of Happiness, it’s important to reclaim our cognitive liberty, collectively and individually. Don't ever let anyone rent space in your head, at least not without your consent.

Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

I always love hearing back (and always reply), so don't hesitate.

With ❤️ & skepticism,
~Tayken

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