Counter-Narcissist Cheat Codes: False Bravery - Part II

Political patterns of narcissistic behavior.

In False Bravery - Part I - The Political Lens, we covered how the inspiration for this cheat code came from an illuminating conversation between a likely malignant narcissist and a likely psychopath.

“I just had false bravery memories triggered by a likely malignant narcissist essentially saying they respected the “courage” of their political ally (who not coincidentally is a likely psychopath), after the ally said something horrifically poisonous and racist as a matter of fact, about the narcissist, to their face.

Of course the cowardly narcissist was not declaring the likely psychopath courageous for saying it to their face, as if the spineless weasel was some sort of threat to anything except honor, truth and reality. The suck-up narcissist was saying their likely psychopath ally had “courage” because they were saying the quiet part out loud about their tone-deaf racism and firm belief in American white supremacy. Yes, the likely psychopath’s words flew pretty close to a nazi sun.”

Wow, right?

Well, at least the narcissist helped prove how malignant they are by spinning the likely psychopath’s racism into a positive, and then praised them for it. Indeed, this ridiculous false bravery clown show conversation triggered decades old memories about how the Republicans heaped nefarious false praise upon George W. Bush for doing all the unpopular things they selfishly wanted to do anyway.

Of course this kind of self-serving behavior also rings some very familiar false bravery bells that trump and the maga cult are trying to fool voters with all over again.

trump gave conservatives the option of selling whatever was left of their souls instead of having their long overdue reckoning with reality. Indeed they had to choose between following his sociopathic way, which included throwing away all pretense of ever having had intellectually consistent values or beliefs, thus proving “it was all a lie,” or they can have their “come to Jesus moment.”

As we all have observed, the majority of conservatives and almost all remaining Republicans have made the clear and distinct psychological choice to live trump’s lies instead of confronting their own hard truths.

This is why it made sense to add a middle portion to the false bravery cheat codes to more fully connect how the political lessons of Republican’s recently failed past can help better inform us of what is really psychologically going on with them today. With this history, it helps draw a straight line from Bush Jr’s past false bravery political declarations and the falsely brave, purely narcissistic and looney compulsive declarations of trump and the GOP today.

By taking this extended look at Bush Jr’s history, it should help more people identify and recognize where various false bravery manipulations and tells usually come from, such as how certain behaviors are actually symptoms of someone on the narcissism spectrum, and how a certain number of these symptoms being consistently present informs us of where most to all dishonest politicians, political operatives, corporate titans and their henchmen land on the spectrum as well. Indeed deeper psychological nuance, data and vectors will almost always help us more accurately determine the difference between when someone is just being an a-hole or is sadly a pathological member of the malignant narcissist, sociopath or psychopath realms.

False political bravery and other psychological red flags

While it should be an obvious big RED FLAG when anyone declares themselves brave for doing what will personally benefit them, sadly most trump supporters clearly miss the obvious signs of his all consuming self-serving nature, and he will sell them all out in the end.

This conclusion is based in part on how so many believe trump and the Republicans’ false bravery claims that they constantly make about themselves, when in reality most seem to be nothing more than the most greedy, cynical and cowardly shills American politics has ever produced.

Nearly everyone left in the Republican Party seems to have been either groomed to be completely shameless, under cult-like mind-control, and/or were always a soulless minion waiting to serve any more dominant predatory power. These are among the few logical psychological explanations as to why so many of their voters somehow still believe in them.

Of course the threat a completely dishonest and anti-democratic GOP poses today also tells us how effective they have been at propagandizing and grooming a large percentage of voters into believing in their made-up, self-serving, false bravery, fake macho, and trickster smoke and mirrors interpretations of politics, governing, economics and reality.

The fact that the entire right-wing industrial complex will shamelessly lie, cheat, steal, eat endless amounts of sh*t, shame, and attempt ongoing coups for trump, just as any other malignant narcissist, sociopath or psychopath would do to fill their hunger for power, should tell you all you need to know about how much peril and threat our democracy is in and under. If we can’t stop a narcissist lunatic like trump and anti-American propagandists poisoning us from within now, all may be lost to their disordered chaos.

In my younger days, because I was blessed with a lot of opportunities to win and succeed in sports, games, life, etc., I used to say, “if you need to cheat me to beat me, you need it more than I do.” Indeed, when it comes to malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, they will shamelessly cheat, lie and steal because getting their way and winning are the only things that matter to them. This narcissistic primal urge is why if democracy does not ramp up our counter-narcissist game with a quickness and the DOJ does not start prosecuting Supreme Court justices for actual bribes they have been receiving from those they have been benefiting, again we could lose it all.

I don’t see how any rational person can deny anymore that narcissists of all stripes are trying to take over the world. Just like several in the trump cabal including trump, it is their “public service” opportunities that we must stop, because due to basic pathological narcissist compulsion, they cannot stop their own self-serving disorders to attempt to control and dominate everyone and everything they are wrongly allowed to do so.

On the bright side, after several years of trump’s blatant examples of his psychologically disordered mind, and despite psychological institutional efforts to keep the public in the dark about the predators trying to take over our governments, much larger segments of society are seeing the psychological patterns and red flags that help more fully connect the dots to our highest solutional wisdom.

What can be utilized against these relentless and merciless forces of human dystopia and the Dark Ages is always the question, but time is indeed short so please support CNI however you can in working to provide the psychological intelligence and strategies all forces of good can use to fight for our democracies more effectively, and most importantly, successfully.

trump is Bush on steroids

Indeed while the comparison is useful on certain CNI levels, Bush is very different from trump. However, there are also several telling similarities and plenty of signs of the exact same patterns of behavior. The only difference between the two in many cases are the more grandiose, out in the open, narcissistic patterns that connect the two are just more pronounced, narcissistic and intensified under trump, because trump is Bush on steroids from both a psychological and political perspective.

What a strange coincidence and how familiar to our current times that a spoiled and entitled rich kid narcissist’s self-serving choices, whims and implanted thoughts were spun by those who benefited most as “courageous” and “brave” leadership, we should be praising them, and should never question them. The common evasiveness and attempted dominance to silence questions are hard signs to miss for anyone trained to identify narcissistic tells. They in themselves are not conclusive but they are two big red flags.

Additionally, this was coming from the genius who met Vlad and completely fell for the Putin Illusion, just as fellow narcissist trump did. At their press conference together, the falsely and foolishly brave Bush Jr said,

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

W like most modern Republicans was never right about anything in the end. It’s all short-term, tactical, cynical and ultimately mutually and self-defeating, just like most narcissistic behavior.

Meanwhile, as we were forced to hear this ignoramus show himself to be the clown fool that he was on the world stage, we as Americans were told it was unpatriotic to question or criticize anything he was doing, because we would be “hurting the troops” by attacking the “Commander-in-chief.”

In reality the Bush administration was acting in the exact opposite ways of being brave and courageous by consistently being arrogant, condescending, dismissive and fearful of any accountability whatsoever, just like obvious malignant narcissist trump has acted all along. Hint: Not a coincidence.

In yet another strange yet familiar pattern of corrupted narcissistic symmetry, nearly everything the Bush administration ever did ended up benefiting their “donors” no matter how horrible the results were for the country or anyone else. It was like we were not supposed to notice that despite Bush supporters and GOP owners declaring all “real Americans” must take personal responsibility for our actions, they were consistently reaping massive financial benefits off the government, and virtually none of them took any “personal responsibility” ever, or were even held accountable for doing any “wrongs.”

Maybe there was a one-off or two whispered or mumbled apology as they walked away with huge amounts of public treasury money or pay to play millions and billions, and as they complained about government corruption, fraud and abuse, they were laughing all the way to their bank with our money.

Indeed nearly every time a Republican has declared another is brave or courageous in the past few decades, it is time to check your wallet because false bravery has consistently been a psychological tell that Republicans are making money off whatever they are trying to do, and if they succeed, it will always be at the expense of us taxpayers they keep falsely claiming to be looking out for. How narcissistic of them.

Remind me trump voters, what did Jared Kushner do for the Saudis for them to give him two billion dollars to play with? For some reason I’m blanking on why Bush Jr trusting in Putin and the GOP party platform being completely based on lies, virtue-signaling and malignant narcissism all seems so familiar in our current age.

Gee, what a surprise those demands of an imperial presidency aged as well as his “war of choice,” more tax cuts for the rich, deregulation of the media, the stock market, banking, insurance, telecom and his overall presidency.

How ironic but not psychologically surprising that the right-wing grifters who sold the Iraq war for politics, cruelty and profit and the “conservative” base who bought it all hook, line and sinker, answered their failed faith, beliefs and wrongness by claiming “Bush failed because he wasn’t conservative enough.” How dishonest, manipulative, familiar and narcissistic in hindsight, huh?

Yes, in yet another coincidence, narcissists can almost never honestly admit they are wrong because they cannot psychologically handle being in error, so they just keep doubling down until forced to stop. If this kind of behavior is familiar to you, you may be looking at a narcissist.

Certainly the militaristic Neo-Conservative Republicans led by Dick Cheney (who picked himself to be Bush’s Vice-President) heaped plenty of ego-stroking and public manipulating false praise onto Bush Jr, for supposedly having the “courage” to do what NeoCons and the military industrial complex wanted done long before 9/11.

Bush (puppet mastered by Cheney) sold a reason to invade Iraq, became the first in history to cut rich people’s taxes during wartime, allowed more “conservative” political propagandists to buy up more of the media to support an elite agenda, thus programing more Americans with their lies, cut every corporate regulation that protects our environment, water, food supply, land, sea and air, and transferred vast amounts of taxpayer money to the narcissistically connected wealthy who paid them to do so.

Those are just a few of the many pro-corporate socialism, big government and “Big Brother” policies trump and the christofascists are even more shameless about than the simpleton “Patriot Act” narcissist Bush Jr ever considered. ICYMI, Republicans only hate “Big Government,” big spending and “Big Brother” when they are not in charge of them.

We know this because if it was greedy and self-serving, the Bush/Cheney administration did it, while trump as many of us warned, is “Bush on steroids.” Ten times the malignant narcissism, sociopathy and psychopathy with one-tenth the intellect, pretense or self-restraint.

trump and his nazi mafia co-conspirators are clearly willing to sell out America a million times more if it helps them in any way. On the negative side, it is a testament to their ever-tightening control over public information and the media that such a large percentage of humans around the globe think this kind of self-serving psychologically disordered “Darkness is good.”

Darkness is good for those doing evil

Remember, Karl Rove is said to have picked Bush Jr for President because he saw an incurious, narcissistic frat boy, imbecile who could be easily manipulated because he wanted to prove himself to his father. However, per Rove’s every word and action, he and other psychopathically inclined narcissists of a feather consistently worked to weaponize the Bush Jr Presidency in every possible way, not only for wealth extraction, but to create what Rove predicted would be, "a permanent Republican majority."

The cowardly gerrymandering of House congressional district maps, the undemocratic Senate, the Electoral College over majority rule like every other democracy in history and a corrupt and captured Supreme Court certainly have helped ensure and extend the Republican’s unjust, unearned and un-American minority rule.

Once again how strange that falsely crediting themselves with courage for doing the most self-serving things possible has become more and more Republican standard procedure ever since. Certainly trump is well-known for crediting himself with every popular thing he has never done.

Unfortunately, for a few decades now Republicans have been forced to take credit for things they were against because almost all their publicly declared plans have all failed spectacularly in the end. They now get away with it through all the media they have been allowed to buy.

It’s simple. They just declare a massive victory no matter how spectacular their failure and then their groomed, conditioned and programmed audience goes with the lies they have been manipulated to believe over so many truths that are obvious to any well-informed, reality-based person. What another coincidence that right-wing media consistently programs its listeners by telling them how “brave” “courageous” and “smart” they are for believing their self-sevring version of the “truth.” How dishonest, manipulative, nefarious and narcissistic of them.

Certainly, publicly identifying more of how their tricks work should take away much of the narcissist’s illusion and stealth, which will hopefully also take away much of the abstraction that too often seems to drag psychology down into the weeds. Far too often, broader understanding of defensive psychological knowledge almost appears to drift away in society’s memory, until the next time.

In this case, even using only a straightforward political lens with a little bit of a psychological filter can help more people see that anyone who ever declared Bush “brave” for invading Iraq or if anyone ever has declared themselves or someone else as “brave” or “courageous” for doing what they self-servingly want to do or were incentivized to do, is a liar, a fool, a pathological conscienceless manipulator, a paid spokesperson, or just as likely to be two of, three of, or all of the above.

Perhaps the saddest part of all is how many otherwise decent conservative folks have been groomed, gaslit and propagandized by the pathological trickster GOP leaders, henchmen and media of the malignant and predatory narcissist variety, who have convinced them being kind is selfish and being selfish is doing good.

The Republican psychological operation has been so comprehensive that their base now believes big lies are truths and basic fundamental truths are lies. This reality is why MAGA Republicans are now widely considered to mimic a cult and CNI urges implementing psychological anti-cult countermeasures very soon, because far too soon, it could be too late.

On the positive side, the disturbing narcissist/psychopathic racist conversation in conjunction with the Bush false bravery memories gave CNI a golden opportunity to bring home how false “bravery” psychological manipulations are tells that help us better recognize dishonest politicians, political operatives and others, who also present with several tells of malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, such as via our likely malignant narcissist/psychopath conversation mystery couple.

The Mixed Political Psychological Lesson

Sadly, what corrupt politicians, narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths all want is for everyone to be distracted and divided so we never focus on all the no good they are up to, due to the fact that most have little to no conscience or qualms in doing whatever shameless thing it takes to keep their power and privilege, which of course are antisocial self-serving patterns of behavior in themselves.

Always remember, virtually no one has ever been politically “brave” for doing what they want to do, are paid to do, or it is in their own self-interest to do. If they or anyone else declares themselves “brave” for just going along with what they would have self-servingly done anyway, they are a liar, fool or both.

Just know that either behavior is a very strong tell, because if a person is willing to declare someone brave for making a self-interested “tough call,” they reveal they have little to no integrity, so they will most assuredly lie about almost anything else out of self-interest as well.

As noted in Part I, when “this behavior is done consistently, without much if any true shame, guilt or remorse, they are practically acting like the definition of a pathological narcissist, and fast approaching a malignant one, which means a political lens is mostly ineffective in understanding them, and why we used a mix of a political lens and a CNI psychological lens to help more people better understand the full lesson about the false bravery BS of narcissists before we go to the slippery and elusive darkness so many find with the psychological lens.

Remember, clinical-level narcissist pathology is compulsive maladaptive behavior, so if we observe compulsive maladaptive political behaviors in a political party that easily rhyme with most of the traits, tells and symptoms of clinical-level narcissism, it seems safe to say these patterns tell us their political and psychology are most likely closely connected, if not foundational to every motive and action of the group.

In Part III, we will fully move on to what the Psychological Lens reveals and about how truly clownish, ridiculous, damaged and malignant the narcissist revealed himself to be, in crediting the likely psychopath with any form of courage, and how the likely psychopath glitched when they cognitively understood that they had gone too far, even for them.

The connective tissues here in Part II are to help everyone further get their psychological bearings and to clearly understand that when a politician or anyone does unpopular things that they and their owners selfishly wanted to do anyway, and then they claim how “righteous” and “brave” they are for doing it, this is textbook self-serving narcissistic behavior in CNI’s book.

In fact, as we often note, if people are putting the same trauma, lies, fears, hate and poison out into the world as clinical narcissists, what difference does it make if they are tested to be one or not. The damage to society is the same and it also takes societal awareness to stop it. We as free society’s must protect ourselves from them, because no one else will.

Democracies are always at a disadvantage to fascists & other authoritarians when we allow these malignant narcissists to use our democracy’s freedoms against our own rights to gain power over us. This is why countering these narcissists with CNI-type reverse-psychology is one of our best & most urgently needed increased defenses.

“If we don’t stop them, no one will.” is so urgent and true that it should be said twice or as many times as it takes to save the American and the democratic world from trump and the maga cabal of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths endlessly thirsting for the power to control, prey on and dominate everyone of us. Certainly there is nothing brave about desiring for or submitting to a narcissist’s disordered fantasy. The brave are those who rebel against such darkness.