Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Walker M. Lazar Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired. Nervous Breakdown, Narcissism and Self-Destruction.



This was sent to me by a beloved member of our extended family in Australia 
and a fellow memo reader.

Country by country, region by region the author outlines a tough but cohesive response to how we should try and solve the threats. facing the world.  This is one of the best articles I have read.  Whether it is doable is another matter. (See 1 below.)
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Nervous breakdowns, and so they go. (See 2 below.)
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When Obama was president I posted an article by an Israeli Physician who was considered the world's expert on narcissism.

This is another article , not by a physician, regarding his view of narcissism and its application to Trump.

I have always maintained all candidates for public office should be required to take a Rorschach Test.(See 3 below.)
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I do not know whether Sen. McConnell purposely set up his confrontation with Pocahontas but, if he did, it was a masterful act because it ties her more closely to being the leader of The New/Emerged Democrat Party.

With Schumer at the helm supported by naval assistants Waters, Pelosi and Warren and, former candidate Hillary surfacing from her shore based hiding place, The USS Democrat can only sink further.

These people continue to fail to recognize and/or understand why they lost the last election. They are so far left they no longer are on the same field where America plays political football .

Oh well, let them remain in their ideological cocoon and engage in their political self-destruction.
++++Political Self-destruction.
Dick

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1) IT IS AN OPINION PIECE, BY A COMBAT EXPERIENCED AND RETIRED US
MARINE CORPS COLONEL.  WHETHER YOU AND I AGREE OR NOT IS IMMATERIAL.
SOME THINGS ARE BOUND TO CHANGE - AND QUICKLY.    WE LIVE IN
INTERESTING TIMES.

 Russia:
Putin is an ersatz macho-man, all hat and no karovi.  Apart from
their latest warships, Russia's navy is generally made of rust.  The
Russian Air Force is one of the world's best, their fighters top notch.
Russia's ill-trained army of drunkards couldn't conquer Romania
(Napoleon and Hitler had similar opinions/thoughts*).  Russian male life
expectancy is lower than that of Bangladesh.  Russia is a mafiacracy
with a doomed economy, dependent on oil & gas exports that fracking in
Europe & the US will make uncompetitive.  Dos vidanya. (Colonel Lazar's
comments/opinions here are not in parallel with many top military
analysts, from the UK, NATO, Switzerland and Israel*).



China: 
No wives, no water, no banks - and a hyper-dangerous military.
Much of China is uninhabited - deserts, mountains, and wastelands.
Habitable China is about the size of the US east of the Mississippi,
with over a billion people squeezed into it.  These people live
compacted along 7 major rivers making them vulnerable to water-borne
pathogens.  Northern China is turning into a waterless dust bowl.
Scores of millions of Chinese men will never get married due to the
Chicom's idiotic one-child policy and resultant mass female infanticide.

100 million bachelors are explosively dangerous.  Chinese state
banks are insolvent after going on a post-2008 loan binge with debt and
credit in China now (according to the IMF) above 200% of GDP.  A sharp
economic contraction (increasingly likely) plus all those angry
unmarried men equals war, the history-honored scapegoat diversion of
tyrant. 
The obvious Chicom choice for war would be Taiwan.  But the Formosa
Strait is 100 miles wide and China has no amphibious capacity.  Taiwan
is on the northern rim of the South China Sea, rapidly becoming one of
the most jeopardous flash points in the world.  Bordered by Taiwan, the
Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and China,
over 50% by value of the worlds shipping traverses it - and China claims
all of it, the entire South China Sea, as its own territorial waters.

This cannot stand.  China must be publicly informed by the next
president that the South China Sea is international waters, period,
there will be no discussion or negotiation.  What is to be negotiated is
the cooperative exploitation of what resources, such as oil, it may
contain.  No amount of Chicom bullying and saber rattling will do any
good.  Every other country on the sea will join the US in this - and so
will India and Japan.

Further, the Chicoms need to grasp that any aggression of theirs in
the South China Sea will be naval only, and thus does nothing to occupy
all their angry young bachelors.  They need to go some place, a place
with lots of water and lots of room for them, a place where the women
prefer them to the local men who are drunks and beat up their wives,
ideally a place once belonging to China but stolen by a foreign
aggressor - so to get it back would give them a mission.  Maybe even a
wife.

There is such a place.  It's called Siberia - specifically what
China called its Maritime Provinces and Russia, after it seized them in
1860, calls the Russian Far East.  The longest border to defend in the
world is that between China and Russia!

It's only a matter of time, at most a decade or two, before Beijing
converts most all of eastern Siberia into Chinese Siberia.  There is
simply no way a dying Russia can hold on to it.  Might as well divert
the Chicoms toward it and away from Taiwan and the South China Sea.

North Korea:

The Norks have no nukes.  The half-kiloton yield in their tests
means they failed to make weapons-grade plutonium.  So they are no
threat to us.  They are a threat to South Korea with 11,000 artillery
tubes aimed at the 17 million people of Greater Seoul.  There is no need
for American soldiers to be hostages to this.  South Korea is a rich
country with a powerful military capable of taking care of itself.  We
do not need to be there any longer.

India: 
The world's largest democracy is prickly, but the only country in
Asia capable of standing up to China.  The Chicoms are building naval
bases in India's Indian Ocean neighbors such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and
Burma, which they call their "String of Pearls" around India's neck.
India is countering with a growing alliance with China's ancient
neighbor enemy, Vietnam.

The next president should build on President Bush's initiative for
military and economic ties between the US and India.  That could include
a joint India-US naval base in Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam on the South
China Sea.  The Vietnamese would welcome us.  Among nations, there are
no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

The Great Game of the 19th century was between the Russian and
British Empires colliding in Asia.  The 21st century players of this
game are China and India.  It's in our interests to be on India's side.

Pakistan/Afghanistan :

Both are make-believe countries with no legitimate rationale for
sovereignty.  The key problem in both is Pakistan's "government within a
government" spy agency, the ISI - Inter-Services Intelligence.  It is
radical hate-America jihadi Islamist.  It created and is in the heroin
business with the Taliban.  The first necessary condition towards any
solution in this region is its dismantlement.

The other key problem is our State Department's anaphylactic
allergy to regime and border changes.  The best solution for Afghanistan
would be for it to cease to exist as presently constituted.  Actually,
it is the same for Pakistan.

The Baluchis of southern Afghanistan and southwest Pakistan want
their own Baluchistan (they have a marvelous harbor and the biggest gold
deposits in the world according to BHP Biliton).  They'd be joined by
the Baluchis of southeast Iran and most likely by the Sindhis of
adjoining Sind in southern Pakistan with the big city of Karachi.

The Tajiks of northern Afghanistan do not want their lives run by
Pushtuns.  They'd much rather secede and join Tajikistan - which wants
our help to stabilize and protect it from Russia.  The Pushtuns straddle
the Af-Pak border.  They dream of being united in a separate
Pushtunistan.  Pakistan's ruling group, the Punjabis, would retain the
Punjab.

But basically, as with the Koreas, this no longer should be our
problem to solve.  Af-Pak should be India's problems to solve - Pak
nukes, after all, are aimed at India, not us.  There is no real nation
to build in Afghanistan, and our troops have no purpose dying for it.
Terrorist threats are the business of the CIA and spec-ops teams, not
the Marines or Army.  Again, we need to ally with India and assist them
in what is their problem, not ours, to solve.

Iran:

This week we learned that Iran's government planned an act of war
against us in our own capital.  It is hard to overestimate the number of
problems in the world that would be solved with this government gone.
And that's the solution: regime change.  Apply a straightforward Reagan
Doctrine strategy to overthrow Iran's mullah regime by sponsoring - with
money and weapons - insurrections throughout the country.

Of Iran's 78 million, over 20 million are ethnic Azeri - almost
three times the number of Azeris in Azerbaijan next door, whom they
would love to join in a Greater Azerbaijan.  There are at least eight
million Kurds, who would fight tooth and nail against their Tehran
oppressors if we gave them support.  There are three million Ahwazi
Arabs who populate Iran's oil patch, Kuhzestan, across the border from
southern Iraq.
 And of course there are the Persians themselves, some 33 million,
whose mass street protests have been so brutally suppressed (and which
the current president did not lift a finger or say a word to support).

A president determined to effect regime change in Iran would
succeed quickly.  The world's main state sponsor of Islamic terrorism
would be no more.  Iraq would be free to flourish, Syria would be
quickly liberated, the threat to the Saudi and Gulf oil fields would be
removed, and of course, Iran's nuclear program would be destroyed in the
process (Israeli spec-ops would see to that).

It's a long list of positives and few if any negatives.  All it
needs is a president with the courage of Ronald Reagan.

Israel: 
The pre-1967 demarcations our current president demands Israel
return to were not borders - they were cease-fire lines where Israel was
able to stop the Arab invasions after declaring its independence in
1948.  The Six-Day War recaptured Israel's legitimate territory, and
that territory, including Golan and Judea-Samaria (the so-called "West
Bank") should remain so.

The Palestinians need to be told to STFU, that they no longer will
be coddled and treated like spoiled children.  They will recognize the
state of Israel as legitimate and Jewish, or they can move to the Sinai,
where Egypt will give them a Palestinian State since the Egyptians love
Palestinians so much (the dirty secret is that the rest of the Arab
world despises Palestinians and calls them rafida, Arabic for the
N-word).

Arabs and Euroweenies who object can shove their Nazi Anti-Semitism
up their noses.

That's the way a pro-American pro-Israel president would deal with
Israel and the Arabs.

Turkey: 
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (air-doh-wan) is an
Islamist megalomaniac fantasizing about recreating the Ottoman
Caliphate.  He is constantly threatening Israel, pretending his high
school navy is a match for Israel's NFL navy.  Yet he has gutted the
Turkish officer corps and filled it with incompetent stooges.

Erdogan needs a US president to explain to him that any duke-out
between Turkey and Israel will result in his total humiliation, causing
his overthrow and Turkey's expulsion from NATO.

Islam:

In addition to the above re: Israel and Iran, the next president
should make a clear and public distinction between Islam the religion
and Islamism the political ideology masquerading as a religion.  That
Islamism will no longer be accorded the respect due an actual religion
but treated with the contempt due any fascist ideology such as Communism
or Nazism.

The next president should draw a distinct line between all variants
of Islamism, such as Wahhabis, Deobandis, Khomeini Shias, and other
forms of Jihadi and Sharia Islam, with peaceful and tolerant forms of
Islam such as practiced by Sufis and Ismailis.  It is with the latter
that the future of Islam lies.

And for any Moslem in the US who agitates for Sharia law, he is
welcome to do so - in a country that practices it, not in America.  As
for Islamic terrorism, its practitioners should receive a drone
strike -a policy of the current president that should be continued.

The current president has, however, utterly failed to champion the
rights and religious freedom of Christians in the Moslem world.  A truly
American foreign policy would do so.

Europe:

It's Old Europe, now known as the Eurozone, serving as an object
lesson of the scam of the welfare state versus New Europe, the liberated
former colonies of the Soviet Union who learned the hard way the evils
of socialism and the virtues of capitalism.

A new president would focus attention on the Baltics, Poland,
Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania,
Croatia, and Slovenia.  And he would politely educate the lands of Old
Europe on welfare state socialism as a religion of envy.  Ireland is
already figuring this out and is recovering thereby.

Mexico:

As Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty significantly helped bring
freedom to Soviet Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the next
president could institute a Radio Free Mexico (including satellite
television and web sites) teaching free market and small business
economics to Mexicans.

Mexico is the land of crony corrupt corporate fascist capitalism.
As a result, most Mexicans live in medieval poverty while the richest
man in the world is a Mexican - Carlos Slim - whose wealth was gained
with state-protected monopolies.  A true free market economy would
enable Mexicans to become prosperous in their own country.

The only real solution to the US illegal alien problem is for those
aliens to want to stay in or go back to their own country where they are
free to prosper.

In the meantime, the next president can use the National Guard,
seriously armed, to secure our borders.  And if drone strikes are so
good at killing terrorists, they should be equally good at killing
leaders of the Mexican drug cartels.

America and the World:  The next president's foreign policy should
be based on the opposite of the current president.  The current
president is embarrassed to be an American.  The next president should
be bursting with pride to be an American.  The current president has a
compulsion to apologize for America, a compulsion to appease those who
envy America and her historically unparalleled success.  The next
president should feel America has nothing whatever to apologize for, and
could not care less about those who envy her.

The next president, as opposed to the current one, should have no
qualms in laughing at the lunacy of Warmism, the theory of human CO2
production causing global doom.  Warmism is the Fascist Left's
replacement for Marxism as a rationale for their seizure of power over
our lives.

CO2 is a trace greenhouse gas (95% of the world's atmospheric
greenhouse gases is water vapor), and our human production is a trace of
that.  One tenth of one percent of greenhouse gases is made by man.
Humans do not cause global warming, period.

Explaining and rejecting this removes the obstacles to the world's
most game-changing technology today - hydraulic fracturing or fracking
of shale gas and shale oil deposits.  Once the political shackles on
this technology are removed, America will not only be fully energy
independent, but a major energy exporter to the world.  The crony
capitalist scam of "renewable energy" will be dead -no more Solyndras,
wind farm boondoggles, and ethanol subsidies.

Oh, Russia's energy stranglehold on Europe will disappear and
Israel will be an energy exporter.  Exposing the Fascist Left's hoax of
Warmism and fully utilizing fracking technology will enable America and
much of the world to live in an era of cheap and abundant energy -
providing the material foundation for an ever-growing widespread
prosperity.

Lastly, the next president needs to explain that America really
does need to be the world's policeman.  As America apologizes and
retreats from the world, the wolves emerge from the forest, from China
to Iran.  Only America can keep the world's wolves at bay.

We do not need to nation-build.  We do not need our soldiers in
Afghanistan.  We do not need our soldiers in South Korea.  We do not
need our soldiers in Europe - Russian tanks (however many can still run)
are not going to charge through the Fulda Gap.  Once we effect regime
change in Iran, we will not need our soldiers in Iraq.

We do need a strong, well-equipped and trained military, an army,
an air force, and coast guard.  But what we need most of all is an
immensely strong navy, along with special forces - Marines, Rangers,
SEALs, Delta, et al.  Without that, the world's wolf packs run wild and
unchecked.

Walker M. Lazar Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired
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2) America's 19th nervous breakdown
By Richard Baehr

With apologies to the Rolling Stones, America's nervous breakdown since President Donald Trump's inauguration seems to be of a different order of ‎magnitude than the many other emotional meltdowns of recent decades (the Clinton, Bush, or Obama derangement syndromes). It will almost certainly worsen in the weeks ahead with continued ‎fights over immigration and the Supreme Court nominee.‎

Sunday night, America celebrated one of its true national holidays: Super Bowl ‎Sunday, an event watched by 100 million people, a third of the population. ‎This year, the political fog that envelops all matters these days naturally ‎also surrounded the football game, which turned out be a masterpiece as these games go. In the ‎weeks leading up to the game, one team became the Trump team, the other the anti-‎Trump team. A startling come-from-behind victory for the Trump team (the New ‎England Patriots) was immediately viewed as a repeat of the upset on Election Day, Nov. 8, and was caricatured as such.

The absurdity, of course, is that the owner of the Trump team is a ‎Jewish Democrat (though friendly to Trump), and the owner of the anti-Trump ‎team (the Atlanta Falcons) is a Jewish Republican. So, too, Trump carried Georgia ‎and was beaten badly in Massachusetts. The halftime performer, Lady Gaga, was ‎attacked from the left for not making a personal statement slamming Trump. Everything now has to be viewed as political. ‎

With the game over, America's annual six-month nightmare without professional or college football has begun. This will allow ‎partisans to focus more intently on the heated political wars. On the U.S.-Israel ‎front, however, there is likely to be significant change and arguably far fewer ‎political battles between the two countries.‎
In the final weeks of President Barack Obama's term, the administration seemed somewhat ‎obsessed with Israel. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power abstained on ‎Security Council Resolution 2334. Secretary of State John Kerry felt the need to ‎give an hour-long speech justifying the U.N. inaction that allowed the ‎resolution to pass, and fire a few parting shots at Israel and its prime minister over ‎settlements, as well as trying and failing one more time to make a persuasive case ‎for the Iran nuclear deal. The Obama team released money ($221 million) that had ‎been held up by Congress to send to the Palestinian Authority. ‎

Israel has been an afterthought in the early weeks of the Trump administration. ‎This is not a bad thing. There have been many presidential executive orders, but ‎none directing a move or directing planning for a move of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Iran nuclear agreement has not been torn up. The ‎administration has been far less fixated on Israeli settlement activity, despite ‎announcements by Israel of construction plans for 5,000 new units that in the ‎Obama years would have caused the faces of the administration spokespeople to ‎become purple with rage and scorn.

The administration, while releasing a short ‎statement on settlements, allowed that policy changes would not come until after ‎Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington to meet with Trump next ‎week. The administration also sharply reversed policy toward Iran, choosing to ‎put the country on notice for its ballistic missile tests, which violated U.N. Security ‎Council Resolution 2231, the resolution that accompanied the nuclear deal. The ‎Trump White House also initiated sanctions against a few dozen Iranian individuals ‎and firms for the missile tests. Most dramatically, the Trump administration ‎seemed anxious to communicate to the leaders in Tehran that the days of America ‎serving as Iran's lawyer and backstop -- excusing away Iranian violations of one ‎agreement or another -- were over.‎

The national newspaper of record for the anti-Trump forces, The New York Times, ‎chose to see in the release of the administration's short statement on settlements ‎an action that fit a pattern of continuity of Trump foreign policy with Obama ‎foreign policy. They saw the same thing in the fact that Trump had neither disowned ‎the Iran nuclear deal nor had gone to war yet with the mullahs. Sadly for the paper, the ‎announcement condemning the ballistic missile tests and announcing sanctions ‎came shortly thereafter. The New York Times may have been clutching at straws ‎to suggest that it retained some semblance of balance in evaluating Trump (he is more ‎like Obama, so he is not that bad on X and Y).‎

The Trump team statement that was released on settlements in fact represented a ‎dramatic shift in policy from the Obama administration approach. Obama and his ‎State Department were obsessed with settlements from the start. They wanted a ‎total freeze on settlement growth, including natural growth. Every ‎failed effort to get the Israelis and Palestinians together was blamed on Israeli ‎settlement activity. Every announcement of a new housing tender or stage in the ‎approval process for new units was greeted with harsh condemnation in ‎Washington. The abstention at the U.N. Security Council on Resolution 2334 was ‎only the predictable final step.‎

The Trump statement was viewed by those who actually read it and knew the ‎background as a more favorable approach to settlement activity than that issued ‎by any previous administration. Press secretary Sean Spicer said the administration ‎does not have an official policy on settlement construction. ‎

The statement that was released refuses to blame the absence of peace on the ‎existence of settlements. It suggests that new settlements may not be helpful but ‎the expansion of existing settlements within their current footprints is not ‎problematic. At a minimum, it indicates that the Trump team accepted the ‎parameters of the Bush-Sharon letters in 2004, which accompanied preparations for the withdrawal ‎from Gaza, and acknowledged that the facts on the ground had changed, and there ‎should be no expectation of Israeli withdrawal from major settlement blocs near ‎the Green Line.
The obvious shift in the temperature of U.S.-Israel relations in a Trump ‎administration is worrying to the Left, which cheered Obama's success in ‎minimizing the power of AIPAC and crushing it on the vote on the Iran nuclear ‎deal. Obama and his team supported the growth of a dovish alternative to ‎AIPAC -- J Street -- which, like the administration, saw every problem between Israel ‎and the Palestinians as attributable to settlements. Obama wanted to create space ‎between Israel and the U.S. and wanted to be freer to publicly criticize Israel. This reduced the confidence Israel had that America would be its protector at the U.N. and would treat Israel as the ally it had been for decades.‎

Trump has made clear that he will treat allies as allies and enemies as enemies. ‎Obama seemed to shift America's focus and allegiance from Israel to Iran. Trump ‎has signaled that Israel is a great friend and that the administration shares Israel's ‎opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. The turn from Obama to Trump is so obvious ‎on Israel that any partial move in the other direction (such as misreading the new ‎settlement statement to imply criticism of Israeli policy) is latched onto as ‎something very significant by Trump critics.‎

Over the last few years, it has been evident that an increasing number of ‎Democrats, including members of Congress, have become more comfortable ‎criticizing Israel. The door to do so was opened wide by Obama. That ‎could change in the next two years, given the vulnerability of many Senate ‎Democrats having to defend their seats in 2018. But the biggest change will be the ‎renewal of a special relationship. At least as far as the new president is concerned, there will not ‎be any nervous breakdown in Israel.‎

Richard Baehr is the co-founder and chief political correspondent for the American Thinker and a fellow at the Jewish Policy Center.
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3)

Coping with narcissistic personality disorder in the White House

A few days ago, I wrote a post for my Facebook friends about my personal experience dealing with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in my family, and how I view the president-elect as a result. Unexpectedly, the post traveled widely, and it became clear that many people are also struggling with how to understand and deal with this kind of behavior in a position of power. Although several writers, including a few professionals, have publicly offered their thoughts on a diagnosis, I am not a professional and this is not a diagnosis. My post is not intended to persuade anyone or provide a comprehensive description of NPD. I am speaking purely from decades of dealing with NPD and sharing strategies that were helpful for me in coping and predicting behavior. The text below is adapted from my original Facebook post.

I want to talk a little about narcissistic personality disorder. I’ve unfortunately had a great deal of experience with it, and I’m feeling badly for those of you who are trying to grapple with it for the first time because of our president-elect, who almost certainly suffers from it or a similar disorder. If I am correct, it has some very particular implications for the office. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

1) It’s not curable and it’s barely treatable. He is who he is. There is no getting better, or learning, or adapting. He’s not going to “rise to the occasion” for more than maybe a couple hours. So just put that out of your mind.

2) He will say whatever feels most comfortable or good to him at any given time. He will lie a lot, and say totally different things to different people. Stop being surprised by this. While it’s important to pretend “good faith” and remind him of promises, as Bernie Sanders and others are doing, that’s for his supporters, so they can see the inconsistency as it comes. He won’t care. So if you’re trying to reconcile or analyze his words, don’t. It’s 100% not worth your time. Only pay attention to and address his actions.

3) You can influence him by making him feel good. There are already people like Steve Bannon who appear ready to use him for their own ends. The GOP is excited to try. Watch them, not him. President Obama, in his wisdom, may be treating him well in hopes of influencing him and averting the worst. But don’t count on it.

4) Entitlement is a key aspect of the disorder. As we are already seeing, he will likely not observe traditional boundaries of the office. He has already stated that rules don’t apply to him. This particular attribute has huge implications for the presidency and it will be important for everyone who can to hold him to the same standards as previous presidents.

5) We should expect that he only cares about himself and those he views as extensions of himself, like his children. (People with NPD often can’t understand others as fully human or distinct.) He desires accumulation of wealth and power because it fills a hole. (Melania is probably an acquired item, not an extension.) He will have no qualms at all about stealing everything he can from the country, and he’ll be happy to help others do so, if they make him feel good. He won’t view it as stealing but rather as something he’s entitled to do. This is likely the only thing he will intentionally accomplish.

6) It’s very, very confusing for non-disordered people to experience a disordered person with NPD. While often intelligent, charismatic, and charming, they do not reliably observe social conventions or demonstrate basic human empathy. It’s very common for non-disordered people to lower their own expectations and try to normalize the behavior. Do not do this and do not allow others, especially the media, to do this. If you start to feel foggy or unclear about why, step away until you recalibrate.
7) People with NPD often recruit helpers. These are referred to as “enablers” in the literature when they allow or cover for bad behavior, and “flying monkeys” when they perpetrate bad behavior on behalf of the narcissist. Although it’s easiest to prey on malicious people, good and vulnerable people can be unwittingly recruited. It will be important to support the good people around him if and when they attempt to stay clear or break away.

8) People with NPD often foster competition in people they control. Expect lots of chaos, firings, and recriminations. He will probably behave worst toward those closest to him, but that doesn’t mean (obviously) that his actions won’t have consequences for the rest of us. He will punish enemies. He may start out, as he has with the New York Times, with a confusing combination of punishment and reward, which is a classic abuse tactic for control. If you see your media cooperating or facilitating this behavior in order to r rewards, call them on it.

9) Gaslighting—where someone tries to convince you that the reality you’ve experienced isn’t true—is real and torturous. He will gaslight, his followers will gaslight. Many of our politicians and media figures already gaslight, so it will be hard to distinguish his amplified version from what has already been normalized. Learn the signs and find ways to stay focused on what you know to be true. Note: it is typically not helpful to argue with people who are attempting to gaslight. You will only confuse yourself. Just walk away.

10) Whenever possible, do not focus on the narcissist or give him attention. Unfortunately we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the president, but don’t circulate his tweets or laugh at him—you are enabling him and getting his word out. (I’ve done this, of course, we all have… just try to be aware.) Pay attention to your own emotions: Do you sort of enjoy his clowning? Do you enjoy the outrage? Is this kind of fun and dramatic, in a sick way? You are adding to his energy. Focus on what you can change and how you can resist, where you are. We are all called to be leaders now, in the absence of leadership.

This post originally appeared at Medium. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
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